Tennessee should win the College World Series, but will Hoover’s hangover stop the Vols?

The Barbarians are “at the pearly gates of college baseball,” to borrow the noble prose of Texas A&M coach Jim Schlossnagle. Swag surfers in Tennessee orange or Smokey gray or whatever the garish jersey du jour is Friday are so close to the shore in the country’s only triple-landlocked state.

The Vols have already appeared in the College World Series. This is their seventh trip overall, their third in the last four years, but they’ve never been to Omaha on such high horses under those black hats. If rah-rah Kentucky celebrated sharing the SEC regular season championship “like it was a goddamn presidential inauguration,” in the unusually acerbic words of Vanderbilt Zen master Tim Corbin, can you imagine how the Tony Vitello guys with studies will let go if they win everything?

A moment of silence for the Vandy Whistler at this very thought.

If you’ve been paying attention to how the SEC displays its superior brand of playoff hardball as usual, this should happen. Despite having three other conference brethren in A&M, Kentucky and Florida and four ACC contenders in North Carolina, Florida State, Virginia and North Carolina State, the Tennessee should win the College World Series for the first time.

That would make UT the ninth conference member with an NCAA baseball championship in its trophy case, the league’s third debutant with a natty in the last four years after Mississippi State in 2021 and Ole Miss in 2022. Alabama and Auburn remain among a shrinking subset. SEC schools that are 0 for Omaha.

Baseball loves numbers, and baseball numbers love those volumes. Tennessee, the No. 1 overall seed, has more wins (55) and fewer losses (12) than any other Division I team. Vols hitters lead the nation in home runs and runs scored. Vol pitchers are third in earned run average. If you prefer advanced stats, the pitching staff is #1 in WHIP and position players are #2 in OPS.

Only once during the season has this team lost consecutive games. This incident on the Big Orange radar happened three months ago, on March 16-17 in Alabama. The Vols shared the SEC regular season title with Kentucky, although they beat the ‘Cats two games to one. They also won the SEC tournament.

So why don’t they crush all comers over the next two weeks? Because they won the SEC tournament. Teams that pile into Hoover tend to turn around either on the road to Omaha or once they arrive.

There are plenty of fun facts that contribute to the SEC’s reputation as the best college baseball league in the country, far surpassed only by one of those nuclear missiles thrown by Florida slugger Jac Caglianone. Most relevant right now: Four teams in the conference have won the last four College World Series titles — and none of them are among the four SEC teams that will play at Charles Schwab Field between Friday and the 23rd or June 24.

But there are also statistics both startling and worrying that portend a Jell-O shot in the gut for the thirsty Vol Nation. Since 2009, the SEC has won nine of the last 14 Division I baseball titles. Only two of those nine teams won the SEC Tournament before riding the supposed momentum toward an NCAA title: LSU in 2009 and Vanderbilt in 2019.

Fewer than half of the SEC Tournament champions since 2009 – 6 of 14 – have even made it to the College World Series three weeks later.

It’s not just that success in Hoover generally hasn’t trickled down to Omaha. Hoover’s quick releases became a regular part of the path to a big ring. Of the last nine SEC teams to win the College World Series, three did not win a game in the conference tournament and three others went 1-2.

Coaches and other baseball insiders have debated this topic publicly and privately for years. The private consensus is that the shorter your stay in Hoover, the more rested your list is for the long march to a bigger prize. Deplete your particular pitching staff through five or six games against SEC opponents, and you may not have enough in the tank to win an NCAA Regional, a Super Regional and the College World Series.

This is a large part of the reason why the hybrid SEC Tournament format of the last 10 postseasons ended. Instead of 12 of the league’s 14 teams coming together to play 17 games Tuesday through Sunday, next season all 16 teams will compete in a single-elimination event that will require just 15 games to crown a champion.

Even better for their national championship hopes, the top four seeds will have to play no more than three games over three or four days at most to be the last team standing at the Hoover Met.

Thus, Tennessee gets the last chance for the dreaded Hoover-Omaha doubleheader in the banned but now defunct SEC tournament format. After losing their opener to Vanderbilt three weeks ago, the Vols swept four games in four days to win college baseball’s top conference tournament in the country for the second time in three years.

Their only problem since then came in the Supers’ second game against upstart Evansville. After putting the Aces in their place Sunday night with a 12-1 Game 3 loss that included seven UT homers, they will launch the final assault for their first College World Series title Friday night against Florida State.

If old-school stats and advanced metrics mean anything, Tennessee should finish the drill in 11 or 12 days. If there is one final surprise left in the SEC tournament title curse, your national champion will be Florida. The Gators found themselves alone in Hoover.