throwback

Been a weird series for us offensively, but hard to argue with the results. Hope we can cash in on opportunities in multiple innings tomorrow - although I'm not going to argue if they want to have another 9-run inning. Brockett did a great job working around trouble and putting up zero after zero. However, I was really excited about what Christo did today. That's back to back great outings for him. The movement on his fastball today was outstanding. He's still having a little trouble spotting it, but wow. Night and day difference from what he was doing last year and early this year to now. He also threw a couple nasty curve balls today. Getting that dude going would be a huge benefit down the stretch for a bullpen that has slowly evolved into a significant strength. Not sure we have anyone else that throws harder than Christo, so he can be a big help if he keeps throwing like he has lately. We're set up nicely for Sunday, as Walsh, Bunz, and Shay all have yet to throw. We came into the weekend needing to sweep, but without Kaminska available and with Olson struggling yesterday, it wasn't a given. I like how things are setting up, though.

This is what happens when you don't latch the plantation gate.

Maybe we can get the NCAA committee to ignore our in-state results and focus on our results against teams from Tennessee? Last night was the epitome of "that's baseball." Omaha gets 3 sac flies / we go 1-for-7 with runners in scoring position. How many 0-2 pitches did an Omaha hitter get a favorable result on? Four? Five? One is too many. We get a runner caught stealing and another picked off base / Omaha takes advantage of 2 defensive miscues for us. Omaha gets a wind-blown 2-run HR. I mean we slept through the first few innings, and that's on us. Omaha takes this game very seriously, and it's up to us to match their intensity. And I have no idea why coaches didn't send Burnham to try to score from second on that last play in the 9th when it became clear Omaha was trying to turn the double play. If he rounds the 3rd base bag hard, the play is in his vision, and he can take off for home when the first basement dives for the return throw. If he's going hard the entire way, he probably scores standing up with his speed and wins the game while the Omaha first baseman is arguing the call. But last night shows exactly why even the best teams lose 8-12 games every year. Sometimes, it just isn't your night. Hopefully we got it out of our system. Need to go 3-0 this weekend, no question.

Having only 2 Top 50 games is killing us. The committee gets the impression we didn't try to schedule tough. The only way to counteract that is to win and win some more. Get our winning pct as high as possible. Just for comparison, Kentucky is on pace for 40 Top 50 games. It's tough to compete when the SEC gets 3 Top 50 games every week and when we had some bad luck on our schedule. I don't think the selection committee would take 14 SEC teams, but it might take 11 or 12. That's going to eat up 1/3 of the at-large bids. Ole Miss is the next-to-last SEC team in the RPI at #40. Unbelievable.

Updated Boyd's World's RPI after the weekend Nebraska - #78 Vandy - #5 - W Ole Miss - #40 - L Iowa - #58 - 3 away Abilene Christian - #61 - L Maryland - #72 - 3 away Michigan - #79 - WLW San Diego - #80 - LLLT Illinois - #93 - WWL Kansas St - #97 - W bluebirds - #133 - L 1 home, 1 away Hawaii - #138 - W South Alabama - #140 - WWW Nicholls - #142 - WWL Illinois St - #165 - WW Penn St - #177 - 3 home TAM-Corpus Christi - #199 - W North Dakota St - #200 - W, - 1 home Omaha - #240 - L - 1 home, 1 away Minnesota - #247 - 3 home Purdue - #259 - 3 away Northwestern - #269 - 3 home South Dakota St - #291 - 1 home Northern Colorado - #299 - WW Other B1G teams: Indiana - #17 Rutgers - #47 Michigan State - #63 Ohio State - #108 ------ 1-1 vs Top 50 RPI 6-7-1 vs Top 100 23 games scheduled vs sub-150 RPI (6-1 so far) We climb nearly 25 spots by winning 3 of 4 on the road - great week! And we're getting more opponents into that Top 100, which is helpful. South Alabama moved out of the bottom 150 as well. Illinois falls from #47 to #93 after dropping 2 of 3 to NW and losing to Illinois St. The lesson? N'western is an RPI killer. We can't lose to this team at home, or we'll give back a lot of our gains from last week. We'll probably give back some of them anyway, playing #240 and #269 all at home this week. Just need wins this week before a huge week for RPI purposes at Iowa the following week.

B1G standings are really strange through 3 weeks - Ohio St and Illinois are in real trouble for making the B1G tourney at this point. If the B1G tourney started today, Iowa and Rutgers would be out / Minny and NW would be in. NW is 2-18 in non-con and 3-3 in conference. Minny is 5-19 in non-con and also 3-3 in conference. Unfortunately, that kind of stuff hurts the B1G's RPI and reputation in the eyes of the NCAA committee. Very odd start to the conference schedule. Because it goes fast, getting off to a slow start is tough to overcome. After next weekend, several teams will be halfway through the conference slate already. 1. Indiana 7-2 2. Nebraska 4-2 Maryland 4-2 Michigan St 6-3 Michigan 6-3 6. Purdue 5-4 7. Minnesota 3-3 N'western 3-3 9. Iowa 2-4 Rutgers 2-4 11. Illinois 3-6 12. Ohio St 2-7 13. Penn St 1-5

Excellent series win - not many teams go into Ann Arbor and beat those guys 2 of 3. Michigan has been playing well of late, but we took care of business. Matthews was incredibly clutch this weekend. But it was also a series we had to have, which is the conundrum when you have a weak schedule like we do. Not much margin for error. Fortunately, we got the job done. Bullpen has been flat out nasty lately - great to see Bunz & Shay nailing down those late innings. Maybe we need to tell Garza, Brockett, and Walsh that the game is in the 3rd inning when they're starting. Crazy how they struggle when starting and have been great out of the bullpen. Winning 3 out of 4 this week on the road is a very strong week. Now we need to follow it up with 4 of 4 at home. No pressure. Wild card now becomes Kaminska - can he get things rolling again? We need him to be great the rest of the way. Northwestern's offense should provide a strong opportunity for him to fix things this weekend.

Everyone knows the best girlfriends are from North Platte.

Absolutely agree - we didn't set out to schedule poorly, but USD and USA are not playing as well as expected. And our midweek games are what they are because of where we're located - not much we can do with those unless we can convince Arkansas or Missouri to play a home and home on Tuesdays. It'd be nice to replace 2 with NDSU or Northern Colorado with Mizzou, for example. Get a bit more of that SEC scheduling bump for RPI purposes. Making the problem far worse is that the bottom of the B1G has horrible RPIs - and we play all of them. Just bad luck. Hopefully, it'll play in our favor in chasing a B1G regular season title at least. I don't think Bolt wants to schedule as tough as Erstad typically did -- which is a good strategy, I think, as the B1G has improved enough since we joined that you don't have to kill yourself in the non-con. (Still some work to do to get the league back to where it was before the terrible 2021 decision to play conference-only.) However, when you don't schedule extra tough, you do run the risk of having a bad luck scheduling year on occasion like this one.

I don't think our RPI has much of a chance to be able to get into the Top 50 at this point - barring about 19 or 20 B1G wins. Our schedule is too weak for RPI purposes. An RPI in the 51-70 range leaves us as a bubble team. Winning the B1G regular season at least gets us on the selection committee's radar, should we not win the B1G tournament. Then we have to hope for a northern team bump. I just keep going back to Rutgers from last year - went 41-14 in regular season, tied for 2nd in B1G regular season at 17-7, and finished as B1G tournament runner-up. They had 26 games versus below 150 RPI. Rutgers even had a #43 RPI. But they got left out of the NCAAs. Our resume this season probably is going to be very similar to theirs - outside of the RPI ranking. We're on pace for 25-30 games vs teams below 150 RPI. I can't see us climbing into the 40s in RPI ranking, though. Maybe winning the B1G regular season would have put RU over the top last year. It's just a hunch on my part. Having said that, last night was a big win. K-State is likely to have a Top 100 RPI once they start playing Big 12 games, so that's a helpful win. The rest of our remaining non-con games are no help from an RPI standpoint. Our B1G home series vs Minny, NW, and PSU are about in the same boat.

Sounds like it'll be Clark starting - guessing they don't want to risk Walsh for even a short outing tonight so he can be ready to go Sunday. At this point, conference games are 100x more important. The coaches loved Clark last fall, but he has been getting way too much of the plate so far this spring. (Kind of the opposite problem of most of our pitchers.) If they can get him going, he has a plus arm, so I suppose it's worth a shot. Maybe they found something to tweak in his delivery working on the side, because I don't think he's pitched in 3 weeks.

Updated Boyd's World's RPI after the weekend Nebraska - #104 Vandy - #8 - W Illinois - #47 - WWL Ole Miss - #49 - L Michigan - #59 - 3 away Maryland - #61 - 3 away Abilene Christian - #69 - L Iowa - #73 - 3 away bluebirds - #84 - L 1 home, 1 away Hawaii - #94 - W San Diego - #111 - LLLT Kansas St - #119 - 1 away Nicholls - #139 - WWL South Alabama - #153 - WWW Penn St - #157 - 3 home Illinois St - #184 - WW North Dakota St - #227 - W, - 1 home Omaha - #234 - L - 1 home, 1 away TAM-Corpus Christi - #217 - W Minnesota - #230 - 3 home Purdue - #261 - 3 away Northwestern - #277 - 3 home Northern Colorado - #290 - WW South Dakota St - #291 - 1 home Other B1G teams: Indiana - #22 Rutgers - #35 Michigan State - #62 Ohio State - #114 ------ 3-2 vs Top 50 RPI 4-4 vs Top 100 26 games scheduled vs sub-150 RPI (9-1 so far) Our RPI bumped about 10 spots thanks to some jumps from opponents - South Alabama, Hawaii, and Nicholls all jumped quite a bit. Would be a big help if USA can keep it going in the right direction. Iowa & the bluebirds took huge nose dives, though. Illinois is going in the wrong direction, too. With Michigan's jump the past few weeks, this weekend becomes even bigger for us. Don't have a lot of chances for RPI helping wins the rest of the year, so this weekend is a big one. Plus it's on the road, so we get an RPI bonus if we can win the series. Couple this weekend with road series at Maryland & Iowa and these are some big chances for us to push that RPI upward. Gotta win. Not sure I've seen a team plummet in the rankings over a 2+ week span midway thru the season quite like Ohio State. Dropped nearly 80 spots in that time. By the way, Vandy is #8 in RPI ... but that's only the 5th best RPI in the SEC. Yikes. 9 SEC teams in the Top 25 RPI. The last 2 national champs are 12th and 13th in the SEC in RPI right now ... and they're still Top 52 overall. We need to schedule at least one SEC series at neutral sites or on the road each year and get some of that RPI boost.

I think there's something to that - we're kind of the 'king' of the North-Central in terms of baseball, so that may help. The NCAA likes picking a few northern teams, even when their RPIs aren't great. Our RPI is so far past 'not so great', though, it's going to be tough. I'd imagine Rutgers not being known much for baseball cost them last year. If that had been us with the same record/RPI, we probably get in.

I don't think it's a 1 bid league, but probably no more than 2 or 3, which is where we've been since the idiotic decision to have us play conference only games in 2021. The B1G was trending upward nicely before 2020 in terms of bids. The last thing the league needs is 4 or 5 teams fighting for the title at 15 or 16 wins, because that could lead to a 1 bid league. Need a couple teams to get to 18+ wins and separate themselves to make the selection committee take notice. Don't want to be Rutgers from last year. Finish 2nd in regular season and tournament runner-up with 41 wins and get left out. I don't know if winning the regular season would be enough to give us an NCAA at-large bid, but it has to be the goal at this point, because that's all we can control.

Yup - he didn't have his best stuff, but defense and offense let him down. Bullpen held up its end of the bargain too. Another costly loss. Things would look a whole lot different if we didn't blow the 6-run last-inning lead at USD, 2-run last-inning lead at CU, beat Omaha, and then beat Nicholls or ACU, as we easily could have. 19-5 would be pretty solid and have us in the at-large mix, even with a weak schedule. Ultimately, though, our non-con struggles have almost eliminated us from NCAA at-large consideration at this point. Probably have to win the B1G regular season to have any shot at an at-large at this point, plus a deep run in the B1G tourney. Huge weekend coming up at Michigan. Gotta get 2 of 3 at a minimum to stay in the hunt, I'd imagine. Drop this series, and Michigan gets to 7-2, while we'd be at 3-3. Long road back from that kind of deficit with us having trips to Maryland & Iowa still on the horizon and Michigan not playing Maryland, Iowa, or Indiana. Starting to look like Michigan got a gift of a B1G schedule, and they appear to be good enough to take advantage of it. And if we somehow get swept, it's over. UM would be 8-1 and we'd be 2-4 with a lot of teams to climb over. I hate to call a series this early in the season a must win, but if the goal is to win the regular season title, this series simply is a must win. On the other hand, B1G standings are a little crazy right now, though, so maybe it won't take 19 or 20 wins to win the league like I thought it might earlier. I mean Minnesota won a series at Ohio St - that's insanity with the way those two teams were trending 2 weeks ago. 1. Indiana 5-1 Michigan 5-1 3. Michigan State 4-2 4. Nebraska 2-1 Maryland 2-1 Minnesota 2-1 7. Purdue 3-3 8. Illinois 2-4 9. Iowa 1-2 Rutgers 1-2 Northwestern 1-2 12. Penn State 1-5 Ohio State 1-5

Kevin Ross would definitely misspell it.

Yeah - problem is they probably don't want to let him sit for a week and a half plus. I'd love to see them add a game Monday in Lincoln vs whoever - Wayne, UNK, Doane even - and give Walsh the start there. Get him on that once a week throwing pattern. Otherwise they start him vs KSU Tuesday and throw around 50 pitches so he can throw Sunday vs Meechicken. But adding a non-D1 game would be a great way to let some of those younger arms to get some more experience (and hopefully confidence). Hood is close to coming back, so it'd be a good spot to get him into a game with little to no pressure.

I'd be stunned if Walsh doesn't start after what he did last Tuesday in relief.

LOL - oops, sorry.

Updated Boyd's World's RPI after the weekend Nebraska - #117 Vandy - #8 - W Illinois - #38 - WWL Iowa - #51 - 3 away bluebirds - #58 - L 1 home, 1 away Ole Miss - #64 - L Michigan - #77 - 3 away San Diego - #90 - LLLT Maryland - #99 - 3 away Abilene Christian - #100 - 1 away Kansas St - #109 - 1 away Hawaii - #116 - W Nicholls - #172 - WWL Penn St - #180 - 3 home Illinois St - #199 - WW South Alabama - #205 - WWW Omaha - #213 - L - 1 home, 1 away North Dakota St - #219 - 2 home TAM-Corpus Christi - #239 - 1 neutral Purdue - #245 - 3 away Minnesota - #248 - 3 home South Dakota St - #261 - 1 home Northern Colorado - #268 - WW Northwestern - #286 - 3 home Other B1G teams: Indiana - #21 Rutgers - #22 Ohio State - #62 Michigan State - #72 ------ 3-1 vs Top 50 RPI is great, but Illinois isn't staying there 3-6-1 vs Top 100 29 games scheduled vs sub-150 RPI (9-2 so far) A few big swings from some of our opponents, which is expected for a few more weeks yet until we have enough data to settle things down, but the overall outlook hasn't really changed. That win over Vandy looks great, but it's also kind of on an island. The overall schedule is very poor. San Diego and South Alabama are a combined 18-27-1. Brutal and well below where they normally are. Our B1G schedule looks far weaker than it did a couple weeks ago, as Indiana and Rutgers made big jumps upward, but we don't play them. This is a schedule that gives us a chance to win the regular season crown, but have to find a way to be more consistent on the mound on Sundays. At least we're not Maryland. Ouch. Doesn't look like they are going to run away with the regular season title or challenge to host a regional again like it looked in the preseason. And the bottom of the B1G .... woof. Michigan hasn't been able to score at all this season & they got 28 runs in 3 games vs PSU. Northwestern finally won a game at least. Minnesota managed to split with the bluebirds in Omaha; they are starting to pitch a bit better, but they can't score either. Purdue's offense is pretty poor as well. If we have to outscore those bottom feeders on Sundays, I think we have a shot to do so - and we need to. Almost have to sweep those 4 bottom feeders at this point. Indiana was very impressive sweeping Ohio St. Hoosiers are definitely a contender.

Or, hear me out, a 45-mile separation could be the perfect distance. (Yes, I've been married a long, long time.)

Jim Rose is one of the most clueless broadcasters on the planet, and today's rant completely reaffirmed his status.

Good news is the B1G tourney is Tuesday thru Sunday this year. So if we play Tuesday, you potentially could start Olson Tuesday & Sunday, Kaminska Thursday. Then you'd just have to find a way to win one of 2 on Saturday with the other guys when the other team's bullpen would be really thin. ::fingers crossed:: I think we could win a second game on Saturday like 20-18 if needed. NU is 10-2 when Olson & Kaminska start - with 10 wins in a row. 3-6-1 when someone else starts. Honestly, I'm surprised we've won 3. Doesn't feel like it.

S#@&!!! What the hell am I going to do with all these t-shirts now? Probably shouldn't have pre-ordered 5000 of them.