It will come down to pitching.Based on quality of opponent, VMI and ULM are our only bad losses. 9-12 against Q1 and Q2 isn’t terrible. I think the blowout and run rule losses are what have skewed things so badly, and understandably so. We had a four game stretch in the Kentucky and Vandy series where we lost by a combined margin of 73-14. If all of those games are close losses instead then the perception is that we’re close, just not quite where we need to be yet.
It will all come down to how many conference games we win. And our schedule after this weekend is stout.
10 sec wins total?Every year the sec has a strong rpi. This isn’t anything new.
when some of these bottom teams start playing each other you’ll see rpis drop
10 isn’t impossible. The only way we get 10 is if a team like Tennessee faulters down the stretch and ends up with a bad conference record But 9 is the number. 11 and 12 are totally out of the question.
again the bet is open to anyone willing to take. 10, 11, or 12
and what you are failing to realize in all those numbers… that when these teams start Beating on each other and losses start to pile up for certain teams their RPIs are going to drop. I mean didnt UTs drop from inside the top 10 to outside the top 20 with the losses to MizZou.
We are competing against all those teams for the final 2-3 spots the sec will get. Our conference will get 9 teams in the tournament, outside chance of 10. The RPI and all that jazz wont trump our conference record at the end of the day.
A team with an RPI of 30, and goes 16-16 (season and tournament) and takes 2 of 3 from said team…will trump us who as a SOS of 3, RPI of 25, and goes 13-18 in conference. Again I’ll wager as much as you want on this. It’s just never happened and wont happen this year just because Mississippi State wants it to.
To credit someone else's gif here a few weeks ago...
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And to add one more
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Aww what the hell one more to close it out
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That might actually make sense if every other major conference didn’t also have teams beating up on each other. As it stands, our RPI has done nothing but gone up since SEC play began, and we’re 3-9 in the league. Being by far the strongest conference in baseball, by multiple orders of magnitude, pays huge dividends as it relates to 75% of the RPI calculation (SOS and opponent SOS).
The 9 with outside shot of 10 is premature at best. Tell me how many SEC teams inside the RPI Top 20 with a record over .500 have been left out? Could be us that gets last spot. Could be Mizzou, Auburn, who knows.
Except it has happened. 12-17 Bama got in. 13 win LSU got in. Hell, back in 2011 or so, UGA was freaking 1 game over .500 overall (31-30), only 16-14 SEC, and got a bid from how high their RPI was. Again, a 30-loss SEC team got an at-large bid based almost solely on how high their RPI was.
also that yese Alabama won 2 games in the tournament including a win over the 6th best team in the country.
so after the tourney their conference records were
Alabama 14-19
Uga 14-19
LsU 13-18
the committee went with LsU who won 38 games opposed to the 31 Georgia won and lsus rpi was over 20 points higher for the final spot.
Historically, 14 SEC wins is almost (but not quite) a guaranteed bid. 13 is about a 50/50 chance. And 12 is a remote chance, but possible. I doubt this year will be much different.It’s certainly a combination of factors, and you’re definitely not completely safe at 13 SEC wins, you would for sure need to do some damage in Hoover to feel any level of comfort. But 13 wins is usually the threshold for “you might get in”, there have been some rare cases where 12 was enough, the ‘21 Bama team you mentioned and us in ‘06 come to mind. But 13, plus win(s) in Hoover, should be the target for most of these teams on the periphery.
Every team in the SEC still has a path to get in. Some paths are more realistic than others, and not everybody will get in, but so far there’s not an absolute bottom feeder with horrible metrics that’s already played themselves out. Ole Miss is in worse shape than anybody right now, but their RPI is only 60 and they have a manageable schedule to finish the year. There’s nobody down in the 100’s like we were last year, not yet at least.