Early SEC Success Makes Kentucky's Path to First NCAA Tournament Since 2017 Much Clearer
LEXINGTON, Ky. — There is new life behind the Kentucky baseball program. It doesn't take a genius to see that. The Bat Cats are ditching the depths of the SEC and trekking upward in the top conference in college baseball.
Behind a 3-1 win over Missouri on Sunday, head coach Nick Mingione's team swept the Tigers and have now won all three of its SEC series in the 2023 season, boasting an 8-1 record in conference play and a 25-3 record overall — its best start to a season since 2012, when it opened 22-0. The 8-1 SEC record is the best start in program history.
The last time Kentucky won its first three SEC series in a season was 2017 — the last time it made the NCAA Tournament. That's now where the attention begins to turn, as the Wildcats have made some serious progress early enough in conference play to where a bid in the tourney already feels within arms length.
"17' was a good year, that's good company to be in," Mingione said after the sweep of Mizzou.
Every year is different, but amassing 14 wins in SEC play appears to hold true as a "magic number" for cracking the postseason, based on recent seasons. Going back to the last four completed seasons — 2018, 2019, 2021 and 2022 — SEC teams who have won 14 or more games have made the NCAA Tournament 100 percent of the time, going 34-for-34.
Putting this into context for where the Bat Cats currently stand just 30 percent of the way through the SEC schedule, they theoretically need to win just six of their final 21 in-conference games to hit the magic number and lock up a spot in the tournament.
Now, it's easy to say that if a team can't go 6-15 to finish a conference slate, it probably doesn't deserve to get into the postseason. While a fair statement, we're not talking about any conference here. This is the SEC, after all. The rest of Kentucky's schedule is anything but favorable:
- April 7-9: @ Georgia
- April 13-15: @ No. 1 LSU
- April 21-23: vs. Texas A&M
- April 28-30: @ No. 4 Vanderbilt
- May 5-7: vs. No. 9 South Carolina
- May 12-14: @ No. 10 Tennessee
- May 18-20: vs. No. 3 Florida
As the D1Baseball rankings stand on April 2, 15 of Kentucky's final 21 SEC games will come against top-10 opponents. Nine of those 15 will be on the road. Following the road series at Georgia (15-13, 1-8 SEC) over Easter weekend, the path gets treacherous in a hurry.
After three games in Athens, Kentucky will stay on the road for its first of two outings against rival No. 11 Louisville. A ranked midweek game sandwiched between two road SEC series — with the latter coming against the No. 1 team in the nation — is a recipe for tired legs and losses.
It's expected that, eventually, some sort of skid will hit the Cats, muddying the waters in some way, shape or form. Mingione's team has proven to be a resilient bunch, but it's hard not to eat a few losses when the top-notch winning programs keep rolling in one weekend after the next.
Going off the magic number, Kentucky could lose its final seven series but still hit 14 wins if it avoided getting swept more than once. This of course is assuming that all 21 games are played and rainouts are avoided.
In the aforementioned seasons, six teams have finished with 13 wins in conference play. Three of those — 2018 Texas A&M, 2019 Florida and 2021 LSU — have still earned an NCAA Tournament bid. Kentucky owned a 13-17 SEC record in 2018 but did not make the cut. Alabama took it a step further and managed a bid in 2021 despite winning just 12 conference games.
Back at Media Day in February, Mingione made it clear what the goal was:
"At the end of the year, two of the last three years we've been one or two wins away. Quite frankly, i'm tired of that. Let's be five or six games up like we were in '17 and we're sitting here talking about 'are we gonna be a national seed or are we just going to be a regional seed?' That's the goal."
Baseball America's latest NCAA Tournament projection placed it in a regional with host Louisville, Indiana and Wright State. The Cats will play the Cardinals twice later this season, run-ruled Indiana 12-2 on March 14 and took two out of three from Wright State back in the second weekend of the season.
Going back to the 2017 ballclub that made a run to the Super Regionals — eventually losing to Louisville — Mingione was quick to note that things are different now that Kentucky isn't playing at Cliff Hagan Stadium anymore, but there are some similarities between that historic team and the 2023 roster:
"The Cliff just played so different than Kentucky Proud Park, but some of the speed and some of the power are very similar," he said. "I think the thing the two teams have in common is the desire to win that dominates. Both teams posses that."
That desire to win is going to get tested, but Mingione's team has already stashed so much hay in the barn that, as long as a collapse of epic proportions doesn't occur, Kentucky baseball will hear its name called when the 2023 NCAA Tournament bracket is announced at the end of May.
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