Tennessee baseball: Ole Miss national title tough for Vol fans to stomach

You won’t find much more proof that the College World Series is a complete roll of the dice and has a huge element of randomness. Tennessee baseball found out the hard way. The sport in general has a higher element of randomness than others, but the way its college NCAA Tournament is set up makes it worse.

Rocky Top had to deal with this watching the Ole Miss Rebels win the national championship on Sunday. Ole Miss was the last team in the NCAA Tournament, and they beat the Oklahoma Sooners in both games in the finals.

That keeps the college baseball national title in Mississippi, after the Mississippi State Bulldogs won it last year. However, this is difficult for Tennessee baseball fans to swallow because the Vols beat both teams playing for the title.

UT first hit No. 1 in some of the polls this year after it swept the Rebels on the road. That was the first sign that the Vols could clearly be the best team in the nation, as Tony Vitello’s team absolutely dominated them in Oxford when they were a top five group at the time.

Already at that point, though, the Vols had beaten Oklahoma at a tournament at Minute Maid Park in Houston. Although they had lost to the Texas Longhorns earlier in that same tournament, beating OU and then sweeping Ole Miss salvaged it. Sweeping the Vanderbilt Commodores a week after OU made it forgettable.

Since that sweep of Vandy, UT had been No. 1 ever since, but it started with beating OU and sweeping Ole Miss. To make matters worse, though, the Vols took two of three from the Auburn Tigers, another team they had to watch from home in the College World Series.

However, it was still the championship series between Ole Miss and OU that made this the most difficult for Tennessee baseball fans to stomach. Watching that was almost as hard as actually losing their Super Regional to the Notre Dame Fighting Irish.

Of course, you could claim a sense of pride if you’re a Vol fan about dominating those teams so thoroughly, as they did beat OU 8-0. However, if the element of randomness is your defense for not reaching the College World Series, it can’t be used for you to celebrate quality victories.

There’s also the fact that the College World Series would show how much of a luck of the draw the Vols had in SEC play this year. They avoided the Texas A&M Aggies and the Arkansas Razorbacks all season long, which could have inflated their own record, as they also made the CWS and were the second and third best teams in the league.

Either way, though, all of this was brutal for Tennessee baseball. They had a much better team than the one that did reach the CWS last year and simply blew it. Seeing teams they were obviously better than actually play it out only made things worse.