The Loser's Bracket Always Means the End

Tulane’s season came to an end yesterday. While extended briefly by a rout of South Alabama Sunday afternoon, the Green Wave then apparently ran out of pitchers who could get outs against quality SEC teams, and Ole Miss smartly lowered the boom. An SEC team playing well is a tough out in tournament play- and Tulane did not look really ready to play at that level- particularly down a pitcher coming out of the loser's bracket.

Frankly, since the C-USA tournament started, there has really been little about this Tulane team that suggested it was a Top 16 outfit- deserving of a trip to the Super Regionals. They seem pretty squarely in that next grouping- in or out of the Top 25 depending on how well they are pitching or hitting in any given week. Candidly, that was the probable upside once JR Crowel went down. Not that he would have beaten Walters this week either. But JR was on a roll at one point last year- right after he won C-USA player of the week- where he had a 0.61 ERA over thirty or so innings. Had he gotten hot at the right time, he really could’ve put the Wave up a notch in competitiveness. Really, Tulane might have made a little bigger run in both tournaments with seven more quality innings of starting pitching.

Still, it is hard to critique a Top 25-ish team, right? It is all a matter of degrees. Tulane is by no means bad. Ask Smoke, right? Tulane is, again, the best team in the state- in a jurisdiction where saying that means something. And the head of Laval is wonderful testament to the recent changing of the guard in Louisiana baseball. The fired coach is the one whose program is chasing. When was the last time an LSU coach was fired for being both unable to beat Tulane and losing ground to them?

As to the weekend, I guess most of the brickbats are going to fall on the heads of the pitchers. Sean Morgan is a nice weekend arm- but probably not a guy who can anchor your rotation in real elite play. In big spots, you’re simply not going to beat the Walters or the Rices of this world with Morgan frequently. I can’t really fault him for the first round loss- they weren’t going to win that game regardless if Walters was on- but Morgan didn’t pitch well in that big spot.

They got gutty efforts from Mohl and Gomes- but that pair pitched against teams that really they ought to beat- fronting their Top 25-ish team as middling-to-plus starting pitchers in a good baseball league. Both had their numbers suffer- as they stretched more than they would normally- with Jones trying frantically to preserve his bullpen.

The hitting wasn’t so good though. Frankly, to win this region, Tulane needed some part of their game to over achieve: Morgan to come out and for one afternoon and look like Gerald Alexander on a good day, score a bunch of runs against a quality Ole Miss pitcher, or do anything against Walters. Accordingly, the hitting was just, well you know, the status quo. The Green Wave came into this tournament knowing they could punish the less than top line pitchers of programs like South Alabama & Bethune-Cookman. So could LSU- and they did not even make the tournament. But they needed to punish the next level.

Tulane couldn’t do it. Couldn’t get runs in spots where they arguably, probably, shouldn’t. Didn’t get the game of their lives from Polteir or Morgan. Since Tulane was not the best team in Oxford, they needed something special from somewhere to capture this regional- and it didn’t happen.

But no one underachieved either. So they got the result they deserved and probably actually were- the second best team in Oxford, the best team in Louisiana (again!).