Mississippi State Showing It Means Business

Mississippi State Head Baseball Coach Brian O'Connor (MSU Athletics photo)

By Colton Watson

College baseball is changing, it's nearing a turning point.

As the financial model governing college athletics once again morphs into its next iteration, the landscape of college baseball morphs with it. Resources will be stretched even thinner for athletic departments in the near future.

Across the country, schools and conferences will have to decide for themselves what level of commitment they are able or choose to make to each of their non-revenue sports—that is, every sport besides football and men’s basketball for most programs. Baseball is in jeopardy of becoming diminished by being put on the financial backburner at dozens, if not hundreds, of schools.

But not Mississippi State.

Mississippi State Baseball is an institution. Twelve Men's College World Series appearances, with Omaha-attained seasons in every decade since the 1970s, illustrate that.

Twenty-one combined conference championships further reinforce Mississippi State’s baseball preeminence.

Twenty-four of the twenty-five largest on-campus crowds in the history of the sport attest to the reverence held for baseball in Starkville, MS.

The Mississippi State Bulldogs play in the grandest cathedral the collegiate level of our game has to offer. The toils of hundreds of Diamond Dawgs coaches and players and thousands of fans have adorned that palace with a national championship, the final brushstroke to the masterpiece of Mississippi State baseball.

That said, a neutral observer of Mississippi State’s last four seasons without the context of decades past would not have arrived at any of those statements above. They would label Mississippi State as an, at best, somewhat competitive baseball program with low points similar to those of a bottom feeder baseball program.

These years are not the norm at Mississippi State, although they do occur occasionally in the program’s history. That Mississippi State can reach the highest mountain in 2021 and immediately fall into one of the deepest valleys in program history almost defies all logic.

Fans, coaches, and administrators had been trying to solve that puzzle for four years. On June 1, Athletic Director Zac Selmon put the pieces into place, as Mississippi State decided that enough is enough when it comes to baseball futility. Patience may be a virtue, but it was no longer a value.

Following his dismissal of the head coach who had brought Mississippi State its national championship, but had fallen from grace mightily since then, Selmon locked on to one of the biggest coaching names in the history of college baseball and held on with a Bulldog grip until the ink was dry on his new employment paperwork.

Brian O’Connor was the head coach at Virginia for 22 years. His achievements in that time outnumber those of some entire programs which still rank inside college baseball’s most elite tier.

In twenty-one eligible seasons, he steered Virginia to four combined conference championships, eighteen NCAA tournaments, nine super regionals, seven trips to Omaha, two national championship series appearances, and one national championship.

He owns a winning percentage above 70% with 885 career victories. He’s a three-time National Coach of the Year and five-time Atlantic Coast Conference Coach of the Year. He is one of only eight active head coaches with a national championship and one of just three with both a national championship and a National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association Coach of the Year award.

Mississippi State just made one of the biggest hires in college baseball history. It is undoubtedly the biggest hire made this century.

Prior to O’Connor’s arrival, Virginia had been to a grand total of three NCAA baseball tournaments. Every College World Series appearance and regional victory in school history was under his tenure. O’Connor was a fixture at Virginia, turning down opportunities at Texas, LSU, and Texas A&M in prior years before making the move to Mississippi State.

Brian O’Connor is only the third national championship-winning coach to ever be directly hired away from the program where he won a title. He’s the only coach to make such a move from a team in a power conference. He is the first national championship-winning coach to make a voluntary career move other than retirement (or un-retirement, thanks to Paul Manieri) since 2001.

He has as many or more College World Series appearances by himself than half of the programs in his new conference. He is also by far the most accomplished coach that Mississippi State has ever hired. It’s not particularly close.

While Mike Leach’s celebrity status and football’s dominance of the collegiate athletic landscape certainly spelled more headlines when Mississippi State hired him in 2020, his resume still wasn’t what O’Connor’s is.

Ben Howland had been to three NCAA basketball Final Fours, but he never won a title and was not an active coach when he was hired at Mississippi State.

(UPDATED) And O’Connor isn’t the only big name making the move to Starkville this offseason. State is adding two-time Assistant Coach of the Year Kevin McMullan as hitting coach and announced June 5 that pitching coach Justin Parker had been retained in his position.

McMullan was O’Connor’s hitting coach and right-hand man at Virginia for O’Connor’s entire tenure there. Muscara, whose season just ended Monday night in the Knoxville Regional final, was the architect behind Wake Forest’s ascension to the NCAA Tournament #1 overall seed and Omaha appearance in 2023, a season where they allowed by far the fewest runs of anybody in college baseball.

Zac Selmon is not only breaking out the checkbook for his head coach, but his actions are equally putting all of Mississippi State’s chips on the table to as well assemble the best coaching and support staff in all of college baseball.

Mississippi State’s commitment to having the best facilities in the game is not up for debate here. College baseball’s mouthpieces already recognize Dudy Noble Field as the best stadium the sport offers, and the tools and resources infrastructure is also second to none.

Clearly with these coaching changes, Mississippi State has shown a monetary commitment toward getting the best results possible between the foul lines of the Dude. The final step, of course, is retaining and adding talent O’Connor can use when he fills out a lineup card.

Multiple media outlets, including College Baseball Central, have reported that Mississippi State plans to commit multiple millions of dollars toward roster construction, a budget that would be near tops in the country for NIL (Name, Image, Likeness).

It’s no secret that Virginia’s reported inability to commit to its baseball roster in this new NCAA landscape likely played a role in O’Connor’s departure, and he wouldn’t have made the move to any team that wasn’t going to commit the resources he needs to compete at the top level of college baseball.

Much of Virginia’s top baseball talent has already declared for the NCAA Transfer Portal, and sources close to Mississippi State baseball confide they plan to act aggressively in both the transfer portal and current player retention. Not only will State have a coach with a pedigree that attracts top players, it’ll have the purse to entice those players to sign as well.

Just six years ago, former Mississippi State athletic director John Cohen promised to hire a head coach with Omaha experience to fill State’s last head coaching vacancy. Fans were somewhat puzzled when he announced Chris Lemonis, head coach of a team that had never hosted a regional and never been to Omaha, as his guy.

That move ultimately proved successful when Lemonis won State its first national title, but it was evident then that State wasn’t swinging as big a hiring stick as it had predicted.

Things are different now. Zac Selmon is swinging the biggest stick when it comes to commitment to baseball. Many questioned how much the former football player and assistant AD from Oklahoma, with a much milder baseball tradition, would handle a baseball hire. When the coaching search began, many questioned if his athletic department would give its “non-revenue” sports like baseball the attention they deserved.

Perhaps we should have known when he fired a coach who won a national title, another unprecedented move in the sport of college baseball, as well as the first known instance in the history of the program a head baseball coach had been fired for on-field performance.

Some outside baseball experts deemed it a rash decision at the time, but they didn’t have the inside view to see the vision Mississippi State really had for its baseball program. Mississippi State just may be the program that's most-committed in all of NCAA Division 1 to the sport of baseball right now. They mean business, and it shows.

And in demonstration of that, the University has also scheduled a public welcoming party at Dudy Noble Field on Thursday evening, inviting fans and media alike to attend and hear from both the newly-hired coach and the athletic director who secured his services.

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