Tony Vitello says Tennessee is in a 'new category' with College World Series run

Tennessee entered the 2023 campaign as the preseason No. 2 team in the country — something Volunteers head coach Tony Vitello thought was premature. The program was coming off a banner 2022 season that was one of the more impressive runs by a team in recent memory. But Vitello thought there were too many questions surrounding his team at the beginning of the year to be ranked that high.

That played out over the course of the season, and Tennessee entered the NCAA Tournament without a national seed.

Over the following three weeks, Tennessee played as close to that preseason ranking as it has pretty much all season. The Volunteers made the top eight in Omaha before being bounced out of the Men’s College World Series with a 1-2 record.

“And as far as the whole team goes, much was made about preseason rankings with this particular group,” Vitello said after losing Tuesday to LSU. “I think guys like Drew (Beam) and others helped kind of get our program to a new category. And no disrespect to any writers or anything like that. We certainly had a lot of talent. But I didn’t think we deserved to be where we were at the beginning of the season. I let them know that. Just a lot of new faces. A lot of things that we had to replace, and we did that by the end of the year, in my opinion.”

Tennessee finished the season, the sixth under Vitello, with a 44-22 record and 16-14 mark in SEC play. The team went 6-3 in the NCAA Tournament, winning the Clemson Regional and the Hattiesburg Super Regional on the road.

But once they got to Omaha, the Volunteers ran into a buzzsaw known as LSU. Paul Skenes shut them down in the first game of the tournament before Tigers left-handers Nate Ackenhausen and Riley Cooper combined for a 5-0 shutout in an elimination game Tuesday.

“I know we won’t be one of the last two teams standing, because number two was our highest preseason ranking, but we kind of challenged these guys to actually become that,” Vitello said. “And maybe we are at least top five or somewhere in that category again — no disrespect to anybody else. So that’s what I’ll remember this team for. And our program needs to get better. But this was a group that helped our program improve, no question, and did some things that others have never done.”