With three of the top eight national seeds eliminated by Sunday afternoon with super regionals still in progress around the country, the No. 3 Georgia Bulldogs are the highest seed remaining after taking the first two games of the Athens Super Regional to advance over the No. 14 Mississippi State Bulldogs.
Georgia won two high-scoring games at Foley Field — 13-12 on Friday and 11-9 on Sunday — to join No. 16 West Virginia, Ole Miss, and Troy in the College World Series, which projects as wide open
across much of the field with two of the three teams currently Omaha-bound unranked upstarts.
The bad news for the winner of the Austin Super Regional?
Following the 11-3 win by No. 6 Texas over No. 11 Oregon on Saturday, the Longhorns have the Ducks on the brink of elimination, but the results around the country haven’t favored Jim Schlossnagle’s program with the upsets set to benefit other teams and subsequently punish Texas since the field isn’t reseed after the super regionals by potentially forcing the Horns to play the highest seed remaining in its opening game instead of one of the unseeded teams.
If the Longhorns are able to advance, the difficulty of the crucial opening game will look similar to 2021, when No. 2 Texas was the highest seed remaining in Omaha, but instead of a reseeded matchup against unseeded NC State or Virginia, the opponent was surging No. 7 Mississippi State and ace Will Bednar, who had just gone No. 14 overall to the San Francisco Giants in the 2021 MLB Draft.
Behind 15 strikeouts by Bednar over six innings, the Bulldogs prevailed 2-1 thanks to fourth-inning runs against Longhorns ace Ty Madden on a sacrifice fly and a triple, enough to overcome a solo home run by Mike Antico to lead off the ninth failed to help a comeback materialize when Doug Hodo grounded out to strand runners at first and third against Mississippi State closer Landon Sims.
Texas was able to win elimination games against Tennessee and Virginia, but with the Bulldogs still looming at the top of Bracket 2, the Horns needed to two more elimination wins to advance to the finals. An 8-5 win put Texas in that position, but Bednar and Sims loomed again. With a second look against Bednar, the bats fared betters, reducing their strikeouts and getting to State’s star for three runs in 6.1 innings. Against Sims, however, the Longhorns couldn’t even produce a hit in the final 2.2 innings as the Bulldogs eliminated a 3-1 margin with runs in the fifth and sixth before engineering a walk-off single in the ninth.
In the finals against No. 4 Vanderbilt, Mississippi bounced back from an opening loss, securing the title with a 9-0 win over the Commodores
So while Bednar was single-handedly good enough for the Bulldogs to heartily deserve the national title they won, double-elimination events like the College World Series don’t always reward the best team — the structure rewards the teams that can best set themselves up for success from a pitching standpoint.
And that’s why reseeding would make such a difference given the importance of the first game — it could be the margin between having a team good enough to win the title given a more favorable opening matchup and coming so close that the team’s legacy lingers as what might have been because lower seeds often benefit from the randomness of upsets while higher seeds with worse luck get punished.
Georgia and Texas both earned top-eight seeds and home-field advantages through the regional and super regional rounds only to lose the benefits earned by their success heading into the postseason, so why should poor luck from results outside of a top-eight seed’s control have such an outsized impact on determining the national champion?
The structure is the structure, and Texas still needs another win against Oregon for this discussion to even matter, but for it to potentially matter so much for the Longhorns for a second time in five years is nothing short of frustrating.
As Schlossnagle says, though, it’s “Win anyway,” starting on Sunday evening against the Ducks at 8 p.m. Central on ESPN.
