MSU Eliminated From Postseason Contention, but Make SportsCenter Top Plays

Mississippi State lost to Tennessee 5-2 in Game one of their series in Knoxville Thursday night. With Georgia’s 10-1 win over Arkansas, MSU has been eliminated from any chance to make the SEC Tournament. The only thing left now is an attempt to stay out of the cellar of the SEC, which State will have to win the remaining two games against Tennessee to do so.

Lucas Laster had a bad 4th inning which ended up giving UT a 5-1 lead and it was pretty much over from there. Ross Mitchell did come in and pitch pretty well with 4.2 innings of scoreless relief, but the Bulldogs could only muster one run offensively for the balance of the game.

State had four hits in the game. Four.

This brings the Dawgs record to 24-28 (8-20).

It happened in 2008, 2009 and 2010 because Coach Polk quit caring about recruiting during his final few years, and then Coach Cohen tried to overhaul the program with his players and it took a while to get out of the muck, but I’m not sure there’s an explanation for 2015.

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It’s hard to imagine how we’ve done it, especially considering we started 13-0, but this is as bad as 2008 and 2009. MSU went 9-21 and 9-20 in the SEC during those years. In fact, it’s pretty clear the only reason we have a slightly better overall record this year than those seasons is because of the lightweight non-conference schedule that got us out to that mirage of a start.

This has been a disaster. 2010’s rock-bottom season with a 6-24 record is the only thing worse, but if State can’t get break their current four game losing streak they’ll be just two games better than that awful year.

One half-way decent thing came out of this particular game, however, is Michael Smith made SportsCenter’s top plays – even getting the top spot for this catch and throw for a double play…

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