Ole Miss pitching staff puts it all together for national championship run
OMAHA, Neb. — Offense is fun and gets the headlines but defense wins championships. A team does not hold up a trophy at the end of a season if their opponent scores more than they do.
The hitting of Ole Miss was electric in the back half of the season and through a postseason run. But the Rebels do not go 10-1 in the NCAA Tournament if the pitching staff does not have the best month of its collective season.
The starters Dylan DeLucia and Hunter Elliott to the bullpen arms of Jack Dougherty, Josh Mallitz, Mason Nichols, Jack Washburn, John Gaddis and others were nearly perfect in June.
Pitching was an issue all year. It was head-scratching at times after the depth was spoken about in February of being the best top to bottom it has been in recent seasons. But then the wheels fell off and a opening weekend starting rotation was not the same come late March after Tennessee rolled into Oxford and swept the Rebels.
Then the April swoon and four consecutive SEC series were dropped and all hope was abandoned by many outside of the program. Inside the bullpen hope was not abandoned.
“We knew we were the staff from the from the beginning of the year. Even in the fall, we saw how competitive it was,” Johnson said. “When we were going through that 7-14 (in SEC play) time with the struggles, we knew that wasn’t us.
“Bieng able to get the recognition that the staff deserves, really from the starting standpoint. Dylan and Elliott took off and in the bullpen we pitched to our ability. We always knew we were capable of doing what we have done for the past month or so.”
All the pieces came together for Ole Miss at the right time over the last three weeks.
Some of those pieces even put off other destinies temporarily to try and purse the one accomplished on Sunday one last time.
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Gaddis is that one specific piece. Transferring in from Texas A&M – Corpus Christi for his final season, Gaddis came to Ole Miss to win a championship and deferred medical school.
In Sunday’s national championship-clinching victory, Gaddis 1.1 scoreless innings of relief after Nichols struggled. He kept the Oklahoma lead at 2-1 at that moment, allowing for Ole Miss to make the 8th inning comeback.
“(Gaddis has) been terrific, and like a lot of the arms that are really good, we struggled to find roles,” said head coach Mike Bianco. “We’ve struggled to find roles and figure it out and you’ve seen it all year. We thought we had a tremendous fall. We thought he was going to be one of the three guys on the weekend. Once we got into conference play that was tough.
“But he’s just a tough kid, just a great kid. How about that? Kid was going to medical school a year ago and said, ‘Hey, I had a pretty good year. I want to go to Omaha,’ and he picks Ole Miss and gets to win the national championship game.”
Ole Miss is littered with those little details of players choosing to come back or make a major life decision only to become major factors of bringing a national championship back to Oxford.
The Rebel bats are the headline grabbers but on Sunday the pitching staff earned their spotlight as well.
