MSU News & Notes | 20 SEC Wins!
It’s Saturday morning, so that means it’s MSU news and notes time.
1. MSU beat Arkansas in Game 2 of their series at Dudy Noble on Friday night. Final score was 5-1 thanks in part to another strong performance by Austin Sexton and multi-hit nights from Nathaniel Lowe and Ryan Gridley.
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2. That makes State 20-9 in SEC play this year with one game to go. It’s the first time since 1989 the Bulldogs have hit the 20 win mark. 1989 also was the last time MSU won a SEC championship….and we can achieve that feat once again today!
Florida lost to LSU on Friday night, putting them behind Mississippi State and Texas A&M who are tied at the top of the league. A win vs. Arkansas guarantees at least a share of the SEC championship.
3. There’s been some discussion about whether or not it would truly be a SEC title since we were swept by the Aggies…at home. They would get the Western division tiebreaker in this scenario and State would actually drop to the 3 seed in the SEC Tourney.
Well, if the shoe were on the other foot I’d say we were the only true champion since we swept them. But, the SEC will recognize both schools as conference champions so we can tally it along the outfield wall along with all our other ones.
Ideally, however, Ole Miss would win. That’s right – I want Ole Miss to win. Just today, so we can win the SEC outright. It would feel different if we lost a series at A&M two out of three, but we didn’t. We got swept at home. It was our only bad series of the regular season but it’s there and I’d much rather finish one game ahead of them.
Ole Miss plays A&M at 2:00 – MSU plays Arkansas at 5:00.
4. Yesterday, in Clay Travis’ weekly mailbag, he responded to a question about kicking Mississippi State out of the SEC to generate more money for the other schools since the league already had one team in Mississippi – Ole Miss.
A few issues.
One, it shouldn’t be assumed that Ole Miss would be the hands down choice by everyone over MSU. I won’t deny they have a perception of success -mostly just because of the Mannings to anyone under 65 – and they have the Grove. But I think if you took a poll of every SEC fan the vote would be no greater than 60/40 about which school to keep. There are a lot of folks that don’t like Ole Miss because they are stealing the big boys’ recruits.
Two, this would never happen. All the other 13 schools would have to unanimously vote to kick MSU, a charter member, out. Unless we just did something incredibly bad, it wouldn’t happen. The article suggest Auburn would be the next to get the boot, so why would they vote us out when they’d know they would be next if money via footprint is what this is all about.
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Three, the article suggest that MSU would land in Conference USA because no one would want us. This is probably the worst analysis given in this steaming hypothetical pile of crap. The Big 12 would grab us up so fast your head would spin. We are a program with facilities that rival any in the country, we compete at the highest level, and Mississippi is nothing to scoff at in terms of market share. The Big 12 picked up West Virginia – who is well outside their original footprint – and has 1.1 million LESS people than Mississippi has.
Four, the SEC will never contract – only expand. The next markets are obviously North Carolina and Virginia. Most likely aimed at bringing in North Carolina State and Virginia Tech, but it could be any of those ACC schools from those two states. The ACC wouldn’t put up too much of a fight because they already have plenty of market share in NC and VA. Those two states are ranked 10th and 12th in population in the U.S. That’s bigger than Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky, Missouri and South Carolina on the SEC map. There will one day be 16 teams.
Don’t waste your time battling with Clay Travis or anyone else about stupid topics like this. People have a perception about Mississippi State that isn’t true. Knowledgeable people who have been to Starkville think differently, but most people haven’t spent any time gathering the facts before spewing their propaganda, so just let them be and move on.