Chris Lemonis reveals his confidence level in Mississippi State for 2025

The 2025 college baseball season is underway. As always, the SEC appears to be incredibly competitive as a college baseball conference and the Mississippi State Bulldogs led by head coach Chris Lemonis are a key piece to that puzzle.

Coming off a season where they went 40-23 and 17-13 in SEC play. That was good enough to go to the NCAA Regionals but no further. This season, however, Lemonis is confident in his group of players being able to take the next step.

“I was pretty confident last year too,” Chris Lemonis said. “But I’m pretty confident in this group. We’ve had a good Spring training. We’ve had a good Fall. I think we have some nice pieces.  We still need some guys in between the lines on game day in the uni do it, but I like our group a lot.”

In the preseason college baseball rankings from D1Baseball, Mississippi State was ranked 18th in the country. That made them one of eight teams ranked in that preseason Top 25 Poll.

It’s been an interesting start to the season for Mississippi State too. Chris Lemonis led the Bulldogs to a quick sweep over Manhattan in their first weekend series of the season. After that, they traveled to Hattiesburg to take on Southern Miss for a midweek game. That ended up being a shutout loss for the Bulldogs, a frustrating result after scoring 35 runs over the weekend.

Still, overall through four games the bats are off to a very hot start. Four different players are hitting at least .400 through four games and all of those players also have an OPS of at least 1.100 so far. In particular, Aaron Downs has been phenomenal in the three games he’s played, hitting .571 with a 1.556 OPS, and a home run.

On the pitching side, Pico Kohn, Charlie Foster, Karson Ligon, and Stone Simmons started games for the Bulldogs so far this season. In their respective starts, they’ve allowed four runs and only two earned runs.

This upcoming weekend Lemonis will lead Mississippi State in another non-conference weekend series, this time hosting the Missouri State Bears. Later in the season, the Bulldogs will play their first Power Four conference opponent during the Astros Foundation College Classic against the Arizona Wildcats. That game is scheduled for March 1st.

Perhaps most importantly, SEC play is scheduled to begin on March 14th with a series in Starkville against the Texas Longhorns. It’s the Longhorns’ first season in the conference.