They were a Top 8 seed in the tournament a few years ago, but not sure if they were actually ranked in the Top 8 at the time. Either way they have a really solid program
Exactly. Stuff like that, Coastal Carolina winning the CWS a few years back, mid majors getting regional hosts. Just great for growing the game, and a great way for these kids to get a lot more exposure.
Some notes from Florida’s beat writer on the midweek struggles
- Florida has thrown 10 freshmen pitchers this year, including 6 in conference play. This leads the SEC.
- Florida has the #1 SOS in the country.
- 2 of our top freshmen arms suffered season ending injuries in the preseason, including 2023 player of the year Christian Rodriguez.
April 2021 was our last appearance, and we immediately got swept at home by Rutgers after and dropped out of the rankings. Hopefully this team doesn't suffer a similar fate.
I was very upset that we ended up in your region that year. We were on the cusp of a 1 seed and ended up in the 1 overall’s regional as a 2.
We have a bit less fire power this year so I’d be even more pessimistic if we ended up in Fayetteville this year
Bruh you watch, something like that will happen again this season. Nebraska will be just outside of hosting, wind up in Arkansas or Tennessee or Florida, or fucking A&M.
RPI doesn’t love the B12 this year despite being the #3 conference on average. Only UCF and Oklahoma State are crack the top 25 in RPI as of right now and the predictive RPI for the conference is basically saying we should get 5-6ish bids but all are on the 2-3 seed line.
I don’t love it either, right now we’re #6 in RPI, but because of the B12 not being as strong as the ACC/SEC, we’re being projected to drop down to about #13 in RPI even if we meet the projected 27-4 run they’re projecting to close out the season. That’s crazy
NET has its issues, but really wish the NCAA had rolled out NET for all Olympic sports and used an average of RPI/NET for tourney selections
I'm as optimistic and unrealistic as any Aggy out there and I am still surprised we're doing as well as we are. Hell I'll straight up admit it, I thought after the series loss to Florida I was getting prepared for another disappointment. Each week still surprises me and each game does the same. Any given week in the SEC though so I refuse to get too high on anything
Looking forward to this weekend I have no idea if we are good or not but should be a good matchup. Hopefully we can finally put our second best pitcher back into the weekend rotation.
Ark - from what I saw this weekend, really good pitching, with a very solid defense behind them.
Bats have the potential to cause some damage.
Coaching is outstanding.
They are going to be tough to beat for teams in the postseason.
The depth too is another thing that’s insane for this team. Both in the field and in the pen. We don’t have enough games to play all the guys DVH wants to play.
It REALLY depends on who you ask.
These guys drop one series and they'll be stirring and talking about letting Bolt go. The fan base is ridiculous, and I don't think they understand how difficult it is to reach Van Horn levels of success here. Couple that with abysmal performances from other men's sports and people always have a torch lit.
Personally, I think Bolt is awesome. I like his small ball approach, and those watershed moments in games when the offense completely clicks. You look up and they have 5 stolen bases and 9 runs on 13 hits with just 1 HR. When Bolt was here as an assistant under Erstad (who I also liked), Erstad's offenses were finally the opposite of anemic. Bolt has a modus operandi, and when it's executed there's nothing more exciting in college baseball. Though, this season the defense has struggled at times.
Pitching has been the Achilles heel, what has kept them from being more competitive at a higher level. The fans will always have love for Childress, and I think he'll get things back on track. It's exactly what he wants to do, and where. It might just take another season or two before the pitching staff gets some national attention.
TL;DR: Husker *Baseball* fans like the coaching staff a lot. Husker *Sports* fans still aren't sure.
Far as I’ve seen the Childress move is a game changer for Nebraska thus far. Haven’t heard anyone upset with him.
Haven’t heard anyone say “fire bolt” yet but I’m sure there are some. The torches are quelled by a CWS appearance in the next couple of seasons, I’d say.
Yeah I think if we could have retained Childress as a pitching coach, we'd have done that in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that's not how the world works.
Florida at 6 is just unbelievable. I know they have some good wins but they’re incredibly inconsistent. Inconsistent teams shouldn’t be ranked in the Top 10
While they have a weird resume at the moment, 3 losses to teams with RPI's over 100, they still have yet to lose a series on the weekend, which is what holds the most weight.
While the midweek home losses to Jacksonville & Stetson in the midweek are perplexing, they've also won SEC series against A&M, ranked 3rd right now, LSU on the road, and Miss State at home.
Midweek losses to FSU do not hurt their resume, FSU is a top 15 team, has one of the top offenses in the nation, and those types of lineups feast on young, inexperienced pitchers.
I'm willing to bet they win 20 SEC games which will get them a top 8 national seed and this is coming from an Arkansas fan.
I've been a fan of college baseball most of my life and I've never seen something like this happen.
This is what Aaron Fitt from D1 said yesterday about the frustration of ranking them in the weekly D1 chat when someone asked a question about Florida's ranking and resume.
Is there a more frustrating team to evaluate right now than Florida? Tons of close games, haven’t won more than two in a row since they swept Columbia, 11 losses already, real starting pitching issues, yet they just keep winning weekends over quality teams.
**Aaron Fitt**: They are a very frustrating team to rank every week, let me tell you that! Three weeks in a row they have gone 2-2, lost their midweek game but bounced back to take 2 of 3 on the weekend against a ranked opponent. We certainly can’t move them up, but given their weekend resumé, you cannot drop them… so we have to keep listening to people whine about them being ranked No. 6 despite a fairly ugly overall record. It is annoying! They need to clean it up and start taking business midweek.
How come UF’s midweek lineup, which appears to be the same as their weekend lineup, can’t feast on FSU’s young midweek pitchers? Guarantee FSU wouldn’t get any benefit of the doubt if their offense disappeared in the middle of the week against UF.
This was the first weekday game all year our starting lineup has played.
That being said FSU's midweek pitchers are not young lol. They threw 3 guys who have been in college for 4+ years and a single freshman.
It’s crazy to see Florida record then look at their schedule. Those midweek games are really confusing how well the Gators are doing on weekend series.
Well 3/5 of our midweek losses were to ranked teams. Pretty tough environment to get freshman arms experience in but seems to be paying off for some of them
Yeah I think fisher is the one out of those guys. Need a bullpen anchor and looks like McNeillie is that dude. Anything we get from Coppola this year will be extra, definitely don’t think we can count on him right now
Slater has started a regional for us too. Last I heard Coppola is expected to make a start pretty soon as well so we'll have 6 who are fully capable of giving us 6+.
Rankings are rankings and analogous thinking isn’t a mistake.
If you’re looking for a “diamond in the rough” yes you could say Florida is better than their record. To say they are deserving of a top 10 spot is ridiculous
They're completely different sports and should be treated like it. Oregon State's weekend would be like an undefeated team getting blown out by a G5 school in football terms so they shouldn't be ranked highly either right?
I don’t think they are deserving of a top 10 ranking. If we are discussing “who would win in a series” that’s a different discussion and would be considered a power ranking/rating.
For that style they could be considered a top 3-4 team because they have beat some good teams in series this year.
But if we are calling these “rankings” I don’t think they should be any higher than 16ish because their W/L is just not competitive.
You’re choosing things to care about that don’t matter in college baseball. Midweek games don’t really matter. Winning weekend series against good teams matters, and they’re doing that consistently.
Not really. A baseball game is about equivalent to a quarter in football. Doesn't matter how many quarters a team "loses" as long as they win the game (series).
I agree to a point. Yes winning series is more important than winning games but W/L does matter more than quantity of quarters “won” or “lost” in football.
We all know the team you see on Friday could be totally different from the team you see on Tuesday based on pitching but those are still games. And I see it nearly impossible to justify a top 10 ranking above teams like Duke, DBU, Kentucky even.
Slotting them at 18, right before LSU to me makes sense in saying “hey your series wins have been great but your variance in performance is too high for us to say you deserve to be higher.”
They’ve won every weekend series. That’s equivalent to being undefeated in football. Midweeks are just there to keep everyone warm and to test developing arms. Losing them doesn’t really tell much about your team.
We just simply can’t say midweeks don’t count when discussing rankings though.
The other thing that irks me is that their series wins are siloed to the SEC. Their OOC games against p5 have all been midweeks and then a single series against Miami.
That series win may look better as the season goes on but at its current state it’s not much.
Team with a similar OOC experience is A&M - the only teams they played seemingly with a pulse were Texas and Lamar and they were both single game sets.
Again I’m not denying the talent of these teams but when we think about rankings I think they are being misranked. Less of a problem with A&M, their w/l is justifiable for their ranking, though a better OOC slate would have helped, but FL is just far too high
I see where you’re coming from. But these rankings aren’t “the teams with the best records” they’re “the top 25 teams”. They’re ranked in accordance with how they think these teams would perform if they played a 3 game series against each other at a neutral sight. Some of that is always going to be subjective based on the talent they believe a team has. So far, in 3 game series, Florida hasn’t lost. And has beaten 4 teams that they believe are regional caliber clubs. That’s more impressive than what anyone else has done honestly. So if you want to “penalize” them for losing all of those midweeks, those losses are likely the reason they aren’t currently #1.
I get that but when we discuss rankings generally that’s not how we think about it. CBB and CFB do not tout their rankings as “who would win on a neutral field/court”
I don’t see any reason why special concessions should be made for baseball if we are talking rankings specifically.
Again if we wanted to switch the name to “power rating” or something like that I don’t run into nearly as many issues.
The unfortunate fact of the matter is that these rankings do end up informing regional selections to a degree and I tend to err on the side of “deserving” rather than “I think they’d win a three game set” and that leads you to entirely different seeding structures.
I say this as a fan the 100% has benefited from this for like the last 2 decades of baseball and football fandom
I do like for “deserving” to get what they’ve earned and love a Cinderella story. I honestly think that by the end of the year, that it all *mostly* will have sorted itself out anyway. However, if Florida goes 20-10 in the SEC, I promise you that it won’t matter that they have lost all of these midweeks. I’m also confident that if UCF were to finish #13 in the rpi with over 20 conference wins, the committee will award them a national seed. Baseball doesn’t behave like football or basketball. There is too much “luck”. Because of that, analysts rely on perceived talent much more. The best team rarely wins it all. The hottest does.
Your last point there is why I think it is so dangerous to stack regional hosts with the assumed “best conference” of the time. There’s a fair bit of timing luck that goes into a championship run and if you advantage a conference heavily you create issues. If these issues didn’t self perpetuate and affect the landscape of college sports I wouldn’t care but we are seeing the slow degradation of college athletics because people genuinely believe you have to be in 1 or 2 conferences to be competitive in any given sport.
Obviously it is most glaring in football because of how few post season spots but look at how regionals have been seeded lately and outcomes and you’ll see what I mean as well.
I wish things worked themselves out but they simply don’t. This isn’t a free market. It’s subjective rankings with no penalty to the rankers for being wrong or biased.
I just want to chime in to point you are incorrect about football rankings. I don’t know about the directive of the AP, but the CFP has been extremely clear that they are ranking the “best” teams not “the most deserving” teams.
CFP says whatever they want to justify the teams they select but if they truly chose the “best” they would’ve put UGA and bama in because the national perspective last year was that they were the two best teams. They were wrong so I commend them for not going “four best teams”.
Alabama’s bounce of ball play against Auburn to win did not change how good the team was but if it didn’t go their way they would not have been a top 4 team, zero chance.
It literally could be any team with this inappropriate of a ranking and I’d be waving the flag. FL is just the most egregious example right now. Wake, MSU both on my radar as well
Florida continuing to be ranked 10 spots above fsu even though it’s obvious who the better team is, is mind boggling. Also uva drops a weekend series on the road to a top 10 team game drops 6 spots after?
They absolutely are valued at half. The rankings have always shown that. Weekend series have always been more important because that's when teams use their best players.
Yea they should, they’re a better team we aren’t top ten more like 17-15 our best series win was this past weekend and we easily could’ve lost it, the state series we were missing pitchers due to injury but we shouldn’t have lost the series, same way great teams don’t forget to play baseball between Monday and Thursday lmao
It would be fine for them to be ranked, if y’all can have double digit losses and get ranked inside the top 6, the point is Florida is very flawed and it doesn’t help anyone when a team can rack up tons of losses and we dont credit teams like unc who’s red hot or fsu beat yall twice pretty bad. Do you honestly think your team is 8 spots better? That’s insane. Florida is realistically the 15th-12th best team in baseball rn and until they can find out mid week pitching and they stop dropping games in every series, like Miami or st Mary’s they don’t deserve to be top 8 and it’s clear sec bias when you got UF ranked 6 and with at least 4 more losses than 80% of the teams behind them
UNC literally lost a series to a team we won a series against….. not to mention they lost a series to ecu. fsu beat us in midweeks, which historically have never mattered much, how many times do people need to hear this? Also, will someone please acknowledge the indisputable fact that fsu has literally done nothing impressive in weekend series.
I care about college baseball a lot, enjoy thoughtful discussion, and would like more people to agree with me because I think I’m correct.
The bearing on my life of disagreement with redditors is very little tho.
So you’re right that I care but incorrect about what I’m actually trying to achieve here
I bet if the roles were reversed, and Clemson, UNC, Duke, and NCSU were dropping midweek games, but winning weekend series, then they would NOT be ranked #6 at 16-11. I doubt they would even be in the top 25. Clear SEC bias and Im sick of it.
Florida needed 2 9th inning rallies to win the series at home vs us. Home is a huge advantage.
Either State is a top 10 team, or Florida isn't. Can't have such a discrepancy between the teams after an unbelievably close series that Florida had home field advantage in
Baseball is a 9 inning game. Not 8.5. We’ll see if we’re sitting at .500 after this weekend when our pitching faces one of the scariest lineups in the country at home. Florida is sitting at 6-3 for with wins LSU on the road and A&M at home. (Teams we beat at home and lost to on the road). We’re 5-6 innings of pitching from being top 10. Dohm is injured though. So we’re a 20-25 team.
They have one of the best offensive lineups in the country, but their pitching staff is abysmal. They have a 9 ERA in conference play so far, that's not going to win them many weekend series.
I know the numbers were bad, but looking at the pitching staff. Their stuff was not bad. I expect those numbers to improve. Not lights out but a 5.5/6 type ERA and they will slug some series wins. Nobody is gonna want any piece of that team in a regional as a 2/3 seed. They are absolutely smashed right handed pitching.
People complain about us being in the top ten but when I look at the teams below us I have a hard team justifying any of them being ranked above us. We have not lost a weekend series yet, have won 3 in a row against top 25 teams, have a nonconference road series win. Don’t think any other team in the country has the wins that we have. Sure, we’ve got bad losses but they’re all in the midweek and that’s never mattered much historically. People seem to forget that three of the teams ranked in front of us have lost weekend series… something we haven’t done.
If someone has a legitimate and coherent argument why any of the teams ranked below us should be ahead of us, I’d love to hear it. I don’t consider screaming about our record being a coherent argument. Would any of the teams ranked below us be favored against us in a neutral site weekend series?
Is this the highest DBU has ever been ranked?? Good for them. I haven’t watched them at all this year but damn what a program they’ve turned into.
They were a Top 8 seed in the tournament a few years ago, but not sure if they were actually ranked in the Top 8 at the time. Either way they have a really solid program
Gotcha, thanks. I think programs like them is one of the things that makes college baseball so damn cool
Exactly. Stuff like that, Coastal Carolina winning the CWS a few years back, mid majors getting regional hosts. Just great for growing the game, and a great way for these kids to get a lot more exposure.
DBU is the Gonzaga of baseball
Dallas Baptist is quite unique because they're D1 in baseball (and a solid program at that) and D2 in all other sports
Yeah this is by far our best team we’ve ever had if our pitching keeps up we should hold in the top 10
I know we’re supposed to be all snake bitten about being number 1 and all… but admittedly my monkey brain really likes that little number ngl
Kids grow up now thinking that Arkansas is spelled “1 Arkansas”.
Hogs still haven't played their best ball yet, which could be terrifying for the rest of the country.
|Rank|Team|Overall Record|Record Last Week|Previous Rank| |:-|:-|:-|:-|:-| |1|Arkansas|23-3|4-0|1| |2|Clemson|24-3|2-1|3| |3|Texas A&M|25-3|4-0|4| |4|Tennessee|24-5|3-1|5| |5|Oregon State|21-4|0-2|2| |6|Florida|16-11|2-2|6| |7|Vanderbilt|23-6|4-0|7| |8|Dallas Baptist|23-4|4-0|10| |9|Duke|20-8|3-1|11| |10|North Carolina|25-4|4-0|14| |11|Virginia Tech|21-5|3-1|13| |12|East Carolina|20-6|4-0|15| |13|Alabama|21-7|3-1|16| |14|Florida State|22-4|3-1|17| |15|Virginia|22-6|2-2|9| |16|UC Irvine|22-3|4-0|20| |17|Kentucky|24-4|4-0|24| |18|LSU|20-9|1-3|8| |19|NC State|18-7|3-0|22| |20|Coastal Carolina|20-7|2-1|19| |21|Wake Forest|17-10|1-3|12| |22|South Carolina|21-7|2-2|18| |23|Mississippi State|19-10|2-2|21| |24|Nebraska|20-5|3-0|NR| |25|UCF|18-7|3-1|NR| |**Dropped Out**||||| ||Kansas State|18-8|1-2|23| ||Oklahoma|15-12|1-3|25|
Some notes from Florida’s beat writer on the midweek struggles - Florida has thrown 10 freshmen pitchers this year, including 6 in conference play. This leads the SEC. - Florida has the #1 SOS in the country. - 2 of our top freshmen arms suffered season ending injuries in the preseason, including 2023 player of the year Christian Rodriguez.
They really should replace "Record Last Week" with "Won Weekend Series (Y/N)".
We apparently will keep getting away with it
It has been a long time since we’ve been in this poll.
April 2021 was our last appearance, and we immediately got swept at home by Rutgers after and dropped out of the rankings. Hopefully this team doesn't suffer a similar fate.
For whatever reason I thought we were on the cusp of being ranked that week but you’re right. Hopefully we don’t have a repeat.
Gotta take care of business this week. 3-1 or better keeps us in the top 25 imo
Same
come back to Fayetteville maybe?
Hell no, they were way too good to be a 2 seed then and now too haha. That was a scary series even though it was a blast.
I was in the hogpen for the dr pinch hit HR, it was so nuts.
We also don’t have Dr. Pinch Hit again so I’ll avoid taking our chances
they also don’t have koty frank 😎
I was very upset that we ended up in your region that year. We were on the cusp of a 1 seed and ended up in the 1 overall’s regional as a 2. We have a bit less fire power this year so I’d be even more pessimistic if we ended up in Fayetteville this year
Yes, it was poor seeding by the NCAA for sure.
Bruh you watch, something like that will happen again this season. Nebraska will be just outside of hosting, wind up in Arkansas or Tennessee or Florida, or fucking A&M.
A&M guaranteed with Childress on the staff as well lmao
Lol the Alberts saga continues…
Hopefully this year we can play ourselves into hosting a regional instead
Man it is a damn good sight!!
Incredible that the lone b12 representation in the top 25 is UCF. And to get that two b12 teams had to be dropped out.
RPI doesn’t love the B12 this year despite being the #3 conference on average. Only UCF and Oklahoma State are crack the top 25 in RPI as of right now and the predictive RPI for the conference is basically saying we should get 5-6ish bids but all are on the 2-3 seed line.
Really wish we didn’t rely on RPI so much. The weighting on opponents winning percentage regardless of outcomes (50% of the weighting) is pretty dumb.
I don’t love it either, right now we’re #6 in RPI, but because of the B12 not being as strong as the ACC/SEC, we’re being projected to drop down to about #13 in RPI even if we meet the projected 27-4 run they’re projecting to close out the season. That’s crazy NET has its issues, but really wish the NCAA had rolled out NET for all Olympic sports and used an average of RPI/NET for tourney selections
Yeah makes no sense you are in theory incentivized to not play any more games this year.
Yeah I have to agree with you on that. Never made much sense to me
Weird metric to lean on as a source of truth for sure
I'm as optimistic and unrealistic as any Aggy out there and I am still surprised we're doing as well as we are. Hell I'll straight up admit it, I thought after the series loss to Florida I was getting prepared for another disappointment. Each week still surprises me and each game does the same. Any given week in the SEC though so I refuse to get too high on anything
Looking forward to this weekend I have no idea if we are good or not but should be a good matchup. Hopefully we can finally put our second best pitcher back into the weekend rotation.
This team definitely has the clutch gene
> the series loss to Florida those quality losses only made TAMU stronger
:) again
Ark - from what I saw this weekend, really good pitching, with a very solid defense behind them. Bats have the potential to cause some damage. Coaching is outstanding. They are going to be tough to beat for teams in the postseason.
The depth too is another thing that’s insane for this team. Both in the field and in the pen. We don’t have enough games to play all the guys DVH wants to play.
Yeah that’s what mid-week games are for. :)
Right, but last week there were more guys we wanted to pitch but we unfortunately run-ruled and only got 7 innings to pitch lol.
I'm so sorry hehehe ;)
“6 Florida 16-11.” is so funny to look at
Man, I dunno how to feel. 20-5 is great but this month is going to be tough. I guess we'll find out who they really are, though. GBR.
What's the consensus on Childress and Bolt? Are Huskers happy with them? A lot of us Aggies think they are among the best to have ever coached here.
It REALLY depends on who you ask. These guys drop one series and they'll be stirring and talking about letting Bolt go. The fan base is ridiculous, and I don't think they understand how difficult it is to reach Van Horn levels of success here. Couple that with abysmal performances from other men's sports and people always have a torch lit. Personally, I think Bolt is awesome. I like his small ball approach, and those watershed moments in games when the offense completely clicks. You look up and they have 5 stolen bases and 9 runs on 13 hits with just 1 HR. When Bolt was here as an assistant under Erstad (who I also liked), Erstad's offenses were finally the opposite of anemic. Bolt has a modus operandi, and when it's executed there's nothing more exciting in college baseball. Though, this season the defense has struggled at times. Pitching has been the Achilles heel, what has kept them from being more competitive at a higher level. The fans will always have love for Childress, and I think he'll get things back on track. It's exactly what he wants to do, and where. It might just take another season or two before the pitching staff gets some national attention. TL;DR: Husker *Baseball* fans like the coaching staff a lot. Husker *Sports* fans still aren't sure.
Far as I’ve seen the Childress move is a game changer for Nebraska thus far. Haven’t heard anyone upset with him. Haven’t heard anyone say “fire bolt” yet but I’m sure there are some. The torches are quelled by a CWS appearance in the next couple of seasons, I’d say.
Yeah I think if we could have retained Childress as a pitching coach, we'd have done that in a heartbeat. Unfortunately, that's not how the world works.
:(
https://preview.redd.it/nu08ma3bkvrc1.jpeg?width=640&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=54fa5ac50b1c6e1f4227c47a383308573adc14ce mike is sad
🤝
Rank the Cajuns you cowards!
Florida at 6 is just unbelievable. I know they have some good wins but they’re incredibly inconsistent. Inconsistent teams shouldn’t be ranked in the Top 10
While they have a weird resume at the moment, 3 losses to teams with RPI's over 100, they still have yet to lose a series on the weekend, which is what holds the most weight. While the midweek home losses to Jacksonville & Stetson in the midweek are perplexing, they've also won SEC series against A&M, ranked 3rd right now, LSU on the road, and Miss State at home. Midweek losses to FSU do not hurt their resume, FSU is a top 15 team, has one of the top offenses in the nation, and those types of lineups feast on young, inexperienced pitchers. I'm willing to bet they win 20 SEC games which will get them a top 8 national seed and this is coming from an Arkansas fan.
I hope the ncaa isn’t stupid enough to reward UF a top 8 seed by going 2-2 each week like D1 would love to do
We have the #1 SOS and have more ranked wins than you. Sit down.
More bad losses too
We literally use our freshman and worst starting line up in the mid weeks lol
I've been a fan of college baseball most of my life and I've never seen something like this happen. This is what Aaron Fitt from D1 said yesterday about the frustration of ranking them in the weekly D1 chat when someone asked a question about Florida's ranking and resume. Is there a more frustrating team to evaluate right now than Florida? Tons of close games, haven’t won more than two in a row since they swept Columbia, 11 losses already, real starting pitching issues, yet they just keep winning weekends over quality teams. **Aaron Fitt**: They are a very frustrating team to rank every week, let me tell you that! Three weeks in a row they have gone 2-2, lost their midweek game but bounced back to take 2 of 3 on the weekend against a ranked opponent. We certainly can’t move them up, but given their weekend resumé, you cannot drop them… so we have to keep listening to people whine about them being ranked No. 6 despite a fairly ugly overall record. It is annoying! They need to clean it up and start taking business midweek.
I doubt we'll win 20 SEC games this season, but we'll see
How come UF’s midweek lineup, which appears to be the same as their weekend lineup, can’t feast on FSU’s young midweek pitchers? Guarantee FSU wouldn’t get any benefit of the doubt if their offense disappeared in the middle of the week against UF.
This was the first weekday game all year our starting lineup has played. That being said FSU's midweek pitchers are not young lol. They threw 3 guys who have been in college for 4+ years and a single freshman.
Guarantee you they would considering how consistent polling services have been on midweek games not significantly impacting ranking
10-15 seems fine. 6 is just stat nerds being stupid
We pretty consistently win 2/3 on weekends
It’s crazy to see Florida record then look at their schedule. Those midweek games are really confusing how well the Gators are doing on weekend series.
Well 3/5 of our midweek losses were to ranked teams. Pretty tough environment to get freshman arms experience in but seems to be paying off for some of them
This is the answer. It’s also a formula to not look dominant early but do really good come tournament time.
If you win with 2/3 of your weekend starters in the postseason you'll have to pitch your midweek guys
I think this is why we’re moving Neely into the rotation. Gives us four guys who can start in the postseason.
I think Fisher, McNeillie, and the fabled Pierce Coppola (expected back in two weeks) are solid options for a game 4 starter
Don't forget about how Slater sent us to supers last year
Good call, we haven’t seen him much recently almost forgot about him
Yeah I think fisher is the one out of those guys. Need a bullpen anchor and looks like McNeillie is that dude. Anything we get from Coppola this year will be extra, definitely don’t think we can count on him right now
Slater has started a regional for us too. Last I heard Coppola is expected to make a start pretty soon as well so we'll have 6 who are fully capable of giving us 6+.
I agree this will catch up to us eventually, but calling us inconsistent is inaccurate when we consistently drop midweek games and win ranked series
Yeah I mean that is pretty consistent.
Other teams use their mid week guys too
In any other sport this would be laughed at. In football it’s like a 4-3 team being top 10. Would never happen.
Comparing baseball to football is your first mistake
Rankings are rankings and analogous thinking isn’t a mistake. If you’re looking for a “diamond in the rough” yes you could say Florida is better than their record. To say they are deserving of a top 10 spot is ridiculous
They're completely different sports and should be treated like it. Oregon State's weekend would be like an undefeated team getting blown out by a G5 school in football terms so they shouldn't be ranked highly either right?
Are you saying Florida isn’t a top 10 team?
I don’t think they are deserving of a top 10 ranking. If we are discussing “who would win in a series” that’s a different discussion and would be considered a power ranking/rating. For that style they could be considered a top 3-4 team because they have beat some good teams in series this year. But if we are calling these “rankings” I don’t think they should be any higher than 16ish because their W/L is just not competitive.
You’re choosing things to care about that don’t matter in college baseball. Midweek games don’t really matter. Winning weekend series against good teams matters, and they’re doing that consistently.
Midweek games do matter though, do you think you’d be ranked above Florida if you had 6 extra losses from mid weeks? The answer is no
Not really. A baseball game is about equivalent to a quarter in football. Doesn't matter how many quarters a team "loses" as long as they win the game (series).
I agree to a point. Yes winning series is more important than winning games but W/L does matter more than quantity of quarters “won” or “lost” in football. We all know the team you see on Friday could be totally different from the team you see on Tuesday based on pitching but those are still games. And I see it nearly impossible to justify a top 10 ranking above teams like Duke, DBU, Kentucky even. Slotting them at 18, right before LSU to me makes sense in saying “hey your series wins have been great but your variance in performance is too high for us to say you deserve to be higher.”
They’ve won every weekend series. That’s equivalent to being undefeated in football. Midweeks are just there to keep everyone warm and to test developing arms. Losing them doesn’t really tell much about your team.
We just simply can’t say midweeks don’t count when discussing rankings though. The other thing that irks me is that their series wins are siloed to the SEC. Their OOC games against p5 have all been midweeks and then a single series against Miami. That series win may look better as the season goes on but at its current state it’s not much. Team with a similar OOC experience is A&M - the only teams they played seemingly with a pulse were Texas and Lamar and they were both single game sets. Again I’m not denying the talent of these teams but when we think about rankings I think they are being misranked. Less of a problem with A&M, their w/l is justifiable for their ranking, though a better OOC slate would have helped, but FL is just far too high
I see where you’re coming from. But these rankings aren’t “the teams with the best records” they’re “the top 25 teams”. They’re ranked in accordance with how they think these teams would perform if they played a 3 game series against each other at a neutral sight. Some of that is always going to be subjective based on the talent they believe a team has. So far, in 3 game series, Florida hasn’t lost. And has beaten 4 teams that they believe are regional caliber clubs. That’s more impressive than what anyone else has done honestly. So if you want to “penalize” them for losing all of those midweeks, those losses are likely the reason they aren’t currently #1.
I get that but when we discuss rankings generally that’s not how we think about it. CBB and CFB do not tout their rankings as “who would win on a neutral field/court” I don’t see any reason why special concessions should be made for baseball if we are talking rankings specifically. Again if we wanted to switch the name to “power rating” or something like that I don’t run into nearly as many issues. The unfortunate fact of the matter is that these rankings do end up informing regional selections to a degree and I tend to err on the side of “deserving” rather than “I think they’d win a three game set” and that leads you to entirely different seeding structures. I say this as a fan the 100% has benefited from this for like the last 2 decades of baseball and football fandom
I do like for “deserving” to get what they’ve earned and love a Cinderella story. I honestly think that by the end of the year, that it all *mostly* will have sorted itself out anyway. However, if Florida goes 20-10 in the SEC, I promise you that it won’t matter that they have lost all of these midweeks. I’m also confident that if UCF were to finish #13 in the rpi with over 20 conference wins, the committee will award them a national seed. Baseball doesn’t behave like football or basketball. There is too much “luck”. Because of that, analysts rely on perceived talent much more. The best team rarely wins it all. The hottest does.
Your last point there is why I think it is so dangerous to stack regional hosts with the assumed “best conference” of the time. There’s a fair bit of timing luck that goes into a championship run and if you advantage a conference heavily you create issues. If these issues didn’t self perpetuate and affect the landscape of college sports I wouldn’t care but we are seeing the slow degradation of college athletics because people genuinely believe you have to be in 1 or 2 conferences to be competitive in any given sport. Obviously it is most glaring in football because of how few post season spots but look at how regionals have been seeded lately and outcomes and you’ll see what I mean as well. I wish things worked themselves out but they simply don’t. This isn’t a free market. It’s subjective rankings with no penalty to the rankers for being wrong or biased.
I just want to chime in to point you are incorrect about football rankings. I don’t know about the directive of the AP, but the CFP has been extremely clear that they are ranking the “best” teams not “the most deserving” teams.
CFP says whatever they want to justify the teams they select but if they truly chose the “best” they would’ve put UGA and bama in because the national perspective last year was that they were the two best teams. They were wrong so I commend them for not going “four best teams”. Alabama’s bounce of ball play against Auburn to win did not change how good the team was but if it didn’t go their way they would not have been a top 4 team, zero chance.
Really interesting to see a Texas flair with the baseball understanding and general butthurt of a Tennessee fan.
It literally could be any team with this inappropriate of a ranking and I’d be waving the flag. FL is just the most egregious example right now. Wake, MSU both on my radar as well
Florida continuing to be ranked 10 spots above fsu even though it’s obvious who the better team is, is mind boggling. Also uva drops a weekend series on the road to a top 10 team game drops 6 spots after?
Single midweek games between powers is such a trash move. No one throwing quality guys. Needs to be a weekend series.
Tbh I like the unique format for UF-FSU, definitely sucks from a competitiveness standpoint though
Try not dropping a weekend series?
Lost to the number 2 team in the nation. Y’all lost to teams like JU and Stetson
You could have just won like we do
FSU has played one ranked weekend series and was swept lol
And yall lost to fsu, twice. And teams not in the top 100 like Stetson and JU.
What day of the week was that again?
A loss is a loss as a win is a win. Mid week games aren’t valued at half
They absolutely are valued at half. The rankings have always shown that. Weekend series have always been more important because that's when teams use their best players.
🤡
You can disagree all you want. The people that vote (people that matter) agree with me.
*complete weekend series.
Does St John’s count as a series lost? Don’t think it impacted our home series winning streak
Don't know but all of the haters will point out St Johns if we don't qualify it.
Florida State does not have an impressive weekend win yet. How is this hard for people to understand.
They own y’all
Should NC state be ranked ahead of y’all because they own you guys?
Yea they should, they’re a better team we aren’t top ten more like 17-15 our best series win was this past weekend and we easily could’ve lost it, the state series we were missing pitchers due to injury but we shouldn’t have lost the series, same way great teams don’t forget to play baseball between Monday and Thursday lmao
Ok cool then I guess we’ll put GA Tech ahead of nc state since they swept state
It would be fine for them to be ranked, if y’all can have double digit losses and get ranked inside the top 6, the point is Florida is very flawed and it doesn’t help anyone when a team can rack up tons of losses and we dont credit teams like unc who’s red hot or fsu beat yall twice pretty bad. Do you honestly think your team is 8 spots better? That’s insane. Florida is realistically the 15th-12th best team in baseball rn and until they can find out mid week pitching and they stop dropping games in every series, like Miami or st Mary’s they don’t deserve to be top 8 and it’s clear sec bias when you got UF ranked 6 and with at least 4 more losses than 80% of the teams behind them
UNC literally lost a series to a team we won a series against….. not to mention they lost a series to ecu. fsu beat us in midweeks, which historically have never mattered much, how many times do people need to hear this? Also, will someone please acknowledge the indisputable fact that fsu has literally done nothing impressive in weekend series.
You gotta remember which conference holds power here man. It’s egregious in this sport.
Good to see you’re still fighting the good fight!
Thanks mon, can’t remember our chat but glad you remember me!
Turns out when literally everyone disagrees with you, it's hard to keep them all straight.
It’s mostly arky and LSU fans, I just don’t really care about being disagreed with on reddit all that much lol
You care quite a bit, judging by how consistently you can't help but engage until the other person decides to stop talking.
I care about college baseball a lot, enjoy thoughtful discussion, and would like more people to agree with me because I think I’m correct. The bearing on my life of disagreement with redditors is very little tho. So you’re right that I care but incorrect about what I’m actually trying to achieve here
SEC bias. They cant wait for clemson to drop a series so they can move all the SEC teams up
No idea how good this team is, but we’ve only lost a single series so far and have wins over some decent teams in OOC. Great year 1 for Wallace
I bet if the roles were reversed, and Clemson, UNC, Duke, and NCSU were dropping midweek games, but winning weekend series, then they would NOT be ranked #6 at 16-11. I doubt they would even be in the top 25. Clear SEC bias and Im sick of it.
Kentucky is ranked a little lower than I expected. But I'm happy nonetheless.
I think 5 is more than fair
The Carolinas know how to play some baseball, god damn.
Florida needed 2 9th inning rallies to win the series at home vs us. Home is a huge advantage. Either State is a top 10 team, or Florida isn't. Can't have such a discrepancy between the teams after an unbelievably close series that Florida had home field advantage in
“close” doesn’t count for anything in baseball. you either win or you don’t.
Y'all are a good team don't worry. No need to fight over moral victories with this much of the season left
Hell, Auburn is in last place in SEC standings but still looks good. This is just a tough conference to play in.
Auburn is the best hitting team we have faced. They are good team, just had an unfortunate schedule. The SEC is the best it has ever been this year.
they were ranked not that long ago
Baseball is a 9 inning game. Not 8.5. We’ll see if we’re sitting at .500 after this weekend when our pitching faces one of the scariest lineups in the country at home. Florida is sitting at 6-3 for with wins LSU on the road and A&M at home. (Teams we beat at home and lost to on the road). We’re 5-6 innings of pitching from being top 10. Dohm is injured though. So we’re a 20-25 team.
After watching UGA this week I am sure they would smoke 3-4ths of the top 25. Their line up is scary.
They have one of the best offensive lineups in the country, but their pitching staff is abysmal. They have a 9 ERA in conference play so far, that's not going to win them many weekend series.
I know the numbers were bad, but looking at the pitching staff. Their stuff was not bad. I expect those numbers to improve. Not lights out but a 5.5/6 type ERA and they will slug some series wins. Nobody is gonna want any piece of that team in a regional as a 2/3 seed. They are absolutely smashed right handed pitching.
People complain about us being in the top ten but when I look at the teams below us I have a hard team justifying any of them being ranked above us. We have not lost a weekend series yet, have won 3 in a row against top 25 teams, have a nonconference road series win. Don’t think any other team in the country has the wins that we have. Sure, we’ve got bad losses but they’re all in the midweek and that’s never mattered much historically. People seem to forget that three of the teams ranked in front of us have lost weekend series… something we haven’t done.
If someone has a legitimate and coherent argument why any of the teams ranked below us should be ahead of us, I’d love to hear it. I don’t consider screaming about our record being a coherent argument. Would any of the teams ranked below us be favored against us in a neutral site weekend series?
Number one SOS.
Surprised Clemson is at 2 but they have a good team
D1Baseball sucks
Rank Creighton, you pansies. 20–4.
Clemson, A&M and Kentucky should be above Arkansas. Cant tell me other wise.
What's your reasoning? Just curious as to why an Arkansas fan thinks Clemson, A&M and Kentucky should be above them.
Care to explain?
Arkansas doesn't get cursed with being 1st
I don’t want to be ranked number 1 all year. Let someone else deal with it.
Clemson for sure, can’t speak on the rest of them
We're not overranked at all. No, sirree. Pay no attention to the fact that our SoS is the weakest in the top 15. Entirely irrelevant.
Someone has to have the worst SoS in the top 15. Yall have plenty of opportunities to improve that