OMAHA, Neb. – Less than a month ago, Ole Miss baseball players and coaches didn’t know if they would make the NCAA tournament.
This weekend, the Rebels will play for the national championship.
Next up is Oklahoma in the College World Series finals. The Sooners also had doubts about whether they would make the 64-team field until they got hot in the second half of the season and won the Big 12 tournament for the conference’s automatic NCAA tourney bid.
The best-of-three title series begins Saturday night at Charles Schwab Field, and it won’t include any of the 16 teams that were national seeds for the NCAA bracket. An unseeded team will leave Omaha with the championship for the first time since Coastal Carolina in 2016.
“We’ve always thought we were this good,” Ole Miss pitcher Hunter Elliott said Friday. “I think at one point we were ranked No. 1. … We were scuffling there for a while, but we just continued to believe and knew we were good enough, and we ended up here.”