re: Parity in College Baseball - LSU is not Immune

Found my old posts. These are from 2 years ago. Will have to update them:

LSU baseball post Skip :
'02 : Smoke Laval era begins. Host a regional, get shutout at the Rice Super Regional.
'03 : Host a regional, host a super regional, make it to Omaha
'04 : Host a regional, host a super regional, make it to Omaha
'05 : Host a regional, lose it to Rice.
'06 : We did not qualify for a regional (however we made the SEC tournament). This is an outrage to LSU baseball. Laval canned.

'07 : The Paul Maineiri era begins. We do not qualify for postseason play at all.
'08 : "The streak". After starting out 23-16-1 and looking like postseason was going to be out of reach the tigers woke up and rattled off 16 wins in their final regular season games. They carried that on to win their next 7 in the SEC tournament and Regional. Hosted a regional, Hosted a Super, made it to Omaha.
'09 : One of the best teams in LSU history. Hosted a regional, hosted a super, won the national championship
'10 : This team started off 32-6and people were talking about a repeat national title. But as something that has become a theme with Maineiri's teams, they seemingly went to sleep. The team went 4-14 to finish the regular season and now a regional birth was uncertain. Still, they won their 3rd SEC championship in a row and traveled to UCLA for a regional.
'11 : Start out 16-1 and sweep a top 10 ranked Cal St. Fullerton. Then we go 8-16 losing 5/6 SEC series and midweek games to Northwestern St and ULL. Paul Maineiri comes out and promises that the team will play harder than they ever have and that they were going to put something special together. They did, going 12-3 to finish. But it was too little too late. LSU misses the postseason altogether.

So in 5 years under Laval we never missed the SEC tournament and we hosted a regional every year except the last. That was unheard of so he got fired. In 5 years under Maineiri we have only hosted 2 regionals. We did win a national title which no doubt buys him time. We have missed the postseason outright (meaning not even a spot in our conference tournament) twice! To think that just 6 years ago we were so used to HOSTING regionals that when we didn't qualify for one we fired our coach, and now we're hoping to just make our conference tournament is outrageous!