Spaid finished up the tournament 0-8. Players not named Kobayashi or Parisien went a combined 3-54.
Eight mid-majors are moving on to a Sunday game. Two of those, Liberty and Omaha are going there in the winners bracket. Fullerton and Grand Canyon are leading P5 teams in late innings tonight. Fullerton is up 7-0 over Mississippi State in the bottom of the 5th.
GCU leads Virginia Tech.
Meanwhile, eight P5 teams have already been sent home.
I wish we’d never heard of Eden Bingham!
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Fullerton and Grand Canyon eliminated Mississippi State and Virginia Tech.
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Last time I entertain the thought that a Miami team could actually compete for a national championship. Guess I should have realized the huge gap between elite conferences and the MAC in softball. Softball and baseball must be like football in that regard.
I’m convinced hockey and men’s basketball are the best opportunities to compete on a national stage (in general, not necessarily right now).
I guess I see it totally different. For as long as I was at MU, softball was terrible. Now, for the first time they got ranked top 25 and almost got the HR record. Plus we had a player drafted. The last couple years, we’ve won the conference and had our first All American. Even if we get a new coach (I hope we don’t but just being realistic since shitty bigger programs are prolly looking) we are going in the right direction. One weekend can’t ruin a body of work. Ps, we have at least won a game in the tourney every year the last couple years. That’s going the right direction.
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Agree with you, Yellow. As a Midwest team, we are right in the national mix every year now it would seem - and there are never many Midwest teams who survive too long in the tournament.
This year’s NCAA tournament outcome wasn’t what we hoped for but we just happened to run into a very hot pitcher we absolutely couldn’t solve. And we had to face her twice. If we’d faced anyone else on their staff I think we would have won at least one of the games vs UVA.
And we did eliminate the A-10 champ this year. Last season we sent Kentucky home.
49-9 with all the numbers we put up made for an amazing season. If 2K stays, next season will present a very big challenge - rebuilding.
Eleven P5 teams didn’t survive until Sunday this year. It’s a tough journey. Very proud of what Kirin and her team accomplished!
Love & Honor!
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My thoughts on the lack of offense… if Miami had faced these pitchers at the end of non-conference season, they’d have had more success. I’d guess the non-conference pitching was much closer in quality to what Miami faced in postseason (obviously the Virginia pitcher being heads above anyone else). Hitting against largely poor MAC pitching the last couple months didn’t prep the bats for NCAA’s. Also, it did seem Miami’s offense was slumping a bit the last week or two.
Quite the run, made the softball world notice. This team will be revered forever.
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Amen brother!
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I didn’t think we had a shot at winning it all, but I thought we had an outside chance of getting out of the region.
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I thought we had a good chance of making it to Sunday. I saw an opening game win over UVA, a loss to UT, a win over UD and another loss to the Vols.
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Perhaps next year we can schedule some high profile mid week non-conference games toward the end of the season to be more ready for NCAA T play
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It’s really hard to do that in general at that time of year, but maybe given the quality of our program, IU, UK, OSU, Purdue, ND, or the like who are nearby from bigger conferences might want a quality game.
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UT up 6-0. Bigham is on the hook to take the loss.
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With Tennessee’s 6-0 win today, every one of the six games in the Knoxville Region was a shutout. I wonder if that’s an NCAA record.
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Chalk and other interesting stuff::
It appears all eight of the top seeds won their Regional and will host Super Regionals.
No mid-major survived to make the Sweet 16. Cal State Disneyland was the last surviving member of the class, losing 4-2 to Stanford in a winner take all 7th game.
Only 2 Regional host teams out of the 16 failed to qualify for a Super Regional - Arkansas and Louisiana.
The only team possibly considered a Midwest team to make the Sweet 16 is Missouri - and they’re in the SEC. The two Oklahoma teams made it but they are traditionally considered Southwestern teams.
Interestingly, according to the boadcast team at the Stanford Region, only 10 teams in the entire history of the tournament have ever lost their first game and managed to qualify for a Super Region.
Missouri did it this year. Fullerton could have been #11 as they lost their opening game this year. Close but no cigar!
Was wondering about that first loss stat after the UVA game but couldn’t find it anywhere. Incredibly rare feat
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It’s not a P5 versus G5 issue. It’s a cold weather versus hot weather issue. Not a single cold weather team made the Super Regionals. As I posted earlier, cold weather programs have a single softball NC and haven’t won a baseball championship since 1966.
Can Miami have a successful program that competes for a tournament spot on a regular basis? Yes, but that’s a realistic ceiling for the program. If hockey de-asses its head, it has a realistic opportunity to compete for national championships.
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If what you were saying was bullet proof, Ohio State wouldn’t have a national championship (recent) in tennis. Akron wouldn’t have one in soccer either. And Kent/Miami have gone pretty far in golf. It’s talent, resources, luck and timing. Not geographic location alone. I am not trying to change your mind but it’s not at all binary in my mind.
Edit: you do realize Michigan lost in the national championship in baseball in 2019, right?
It’s not beyond the pale that a team in golf or baseball can catch a heater and make a run. That’s something different than being a perennial contender though In the last 60 years, there have been only two cold weather golf champions. Michigan and OSU not only have all the resources one could wish for, they have two of the most iconic college golf courses in the country, yet they can’t put together a perennial contender because they’re not in the sunbelt. Watch as the B1G baseball and softball tournament championships start to become an annual showdown between UCLA and uSC.
I wouldn’t call soccer a warm weather sport. Like football it’s both played everywhere and is a fall sport in the NCAA. Tennis is a bit weird in that there is both indoor and outdoor seasons, which I would guess levels the playing field for cold weather schools.
I basically agree that having nice warm weather favors teams from the Southern tier for both baseball and softball. It’s somewhat true at all levels of the NCAA but much more so at D1.
The best players gravitate heavily towards schools where they can play in warm, dry weather on their own campus starting in February.
My kid’s D3 baseball team from Hamilton College in Central New York participated in the annual Russ Matt in Auburn and Winter Haven, Florida every Spring Break - usually about March 10-17. Their first practice in Florida was usually the first time they had an outdoor workout. After 10 days and about as many games, they flew back to NY where they fought cold temps, snow and rain from mid-March through the middle of April. That’s a familiar scenario for many northern teams.
As Yellow pointed out, a northern team can occasionally turn out a championship caliber team. He mentioned Michigan. Corvallis has some pretty uncooperative baseball weather until about May most years. The Oregon State Beavers have two relatively recent nattys.
But the bottom line is that teams from warm weather campuses have a distinct advantage.
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