re: What would you assess this team's chances are of 1) making to Omaha 2) winning the CWS?

Yeah we miss Dickinson and Braswell sorely this year.... I have no confidence in our ability to have a Tre Morgan/Wake Forest game type play to stay in a tight game.

Honestly, I won’t be surprised one bit if this team doesn’t make it out of a regional. But at the same time I won’t be surprised if they somehow make it to the CWS. LSU under Jay always seems to turn it on when it really matters. Even the disappointing 24 team was only an out or two away from coming back and winning the Chapel Hill regional and hosting a Super in which they probably would have won that over WVU.

The tournament seems to play out like a microcosm of the full season. I don’t know how far they will go in the tournament, but it feels like this team is similar to 2024:
Continuing to improve each week, but not ready to dominate in Omaha.

1. 10%
2. 3.50%

It’s still pre-season.
It’s practice.

0% 0%

Great post but it ignores the one thing everyone keeps forgetting about which is defense. Everything you said is true. This team is 2nd in the conference in runs per SEC game and 7th in ERA (and we would expect that to get better as the season goes based on past JJ teams). We should be competing for a national seed. But the defense is so incredibly atrocious that we're only average. We lead the conference in errors and unearned runs. We make things so much harder on our pitchers. And I just don't see a way to fix the infield anywhere on this roster.


Omaha is the ceiling. No chance at winning it all. Most likely lose in someone else's regional, but I don't want to underestimate Jay so I'll say we make a SR

Our RPI is 75 today so we’re not even near getting in the 64.

I haven’t seen anything that gives confidence we’ll get to the needed 17 SEC wins so it’s 0 and 0 today.

Unlikely. I don't think they have the pitching.

If we make a Super Regional, it's a best-of-three, like an SEC weekend. So I think we have a fighting chance with Evans, Schmidt, Cowan and Guidry.
Same thing goes if we somehow make it to the championship weekend of Omaha. We have the bats, if someone can get hot.

The problem is the Regional, and then the first week of Omaha. If we stay out of the loser's bracket, go 3-0, we advance. That's like sweeping an SEC series, so not entirely impossible. The issue is if we drop one game, you then rely on the midweek pitchers the rest of the way. As we saw against Bethune Cookman (a 4 seed, maybe a 3 after beating us), we just can't pitch competitively for 9 innings with those guys.

The TL,DR version: I think LSU can beat ANYONE twice. I think LSU is probably favored in the first couple games of a regional, but at game 3 it's a tossup at best, and anything later we're big underdogs.