Ole Miss and Southern Mississippi set for another postseason baseball showdown
When Ole Miss squared off against Southern Mississippi at Pete Taylor Park last month in Hattiesburg, Miss. it was during a last ditch effort to keep its postseason pulse alive. Nobody could have seen what would come weeks later.
Ole Miss beat the Golden Eagles 4-1 and since May 11 have won seven of its last 10 games, including a perfect 3-0 in this past weekend’s Coral Gables Regional to advance to the Super Regional round of the NCAA Baseball Tournament.
That Super Regional round happens to be back at Pete Taylor Park where Ole Miss will face No. 11 National Seed Southern Mississippi in a best-of-three series for the right to go to Omaha.
It is one of those ‘Hello, old friend. We meet again’ moments that is putting the state of Mississippi squarely in the college baseball spotlight once more.
“It’s neat,” said Ole Miss head coach Mike Bianco of an all-Mississippi Super Regional. “A population of about three million people in our state and there might be three million people in Miami, right? We have three million people in our entire state. Really cool and obviously tremendous respect for that program, for what (Southern Miss head coach) Scott Berry has done there.”
This will not be the first time Ole Miss and Southern Mississippi have met with high postseason stakes on the line.
Just last season the pair met in the Oxford Regional and the Golden Eagles took Ole Miss to the brink before the Rebels won the winner-take-all Game 7 of the regional to advance to the Super Regionals.
After not meeting in the regular season in 2021 Ole Miss and Southern Miss resumed the two regular meetings at Pearl and Hattiesburg this year. The two game series was split with the Golden Eagles winning in comeback fashion at Trustmark Park in Pearl before the Rebels evened things up a month later.
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Both of those games were midweek contests, meaning neither team faced the other’s top pitching. Ole Miss did not see Tanner Hall and Southern Miss did not encounter Dylan DeLucia or Hunter Elliott.
“It’s tough. We don’t see the pitching staff or at least the starters,” Bianco said. “You see some of the relievers. The scouting report for the hitters won’t be as far for us. But with all the video that’s available to us now, it doesn’t really matter who you’re playing.”
Now, Ole Miss and Southern Miss are meeting up on the weekend in one of the biggest college baseball series in Mississippi in recent memory.
This also ensures for a second straight season a team from Mississippi will be one of the eight teams in the College World Series field in 10 days.
When the two teams met on a Wednesday night last month there were over 6,300 people in attendance at Pete Taylor Park. The listed capacity is 4,300. Most of those were Southern Miss fans, but it is safe to assume that attendance number on May 11 is going to be shattered come this weekend.
“Obviously they have a great fan base and I think we broke the attendance record last time we were there about a month ago,” Bianco said. “We don’t have a lot of our fans show up on (Wednesday) night but I’m thinking a lot will show up this weekend when we get there.”
Related: Guzzling Kool-Aid: Ole Miss Baseball is moving on, and Bradley Sowell is hyped
