The improbable start to Mississippi State’s 2018 baseball season — the forced resignation of its second-year head coach following the opening weekend — is only outdone by its remarkable end: a trip to the College World Series.
Led by interim head coach Gary Henderson, the Bulldogs can add an even more shocking chapter if they win Friday against Oregon State. The Beavers have to defeat MSU twice to keep the Dogs from their second CWS finals in five years.
This is really pretty incredible when you think about it.
In fact, the NCAA says it has no record of a team with an interim coach advancing to the CWS. Just half of the NCAA tournament’s top eight seeds made it to the pinnacle of the sport in Omaha, Neb. Teams seeded second, fourth, seventh and eighth are no longer playing.
Henderson was promoted following Cannizaro’s bizarre exit in what is believed to be related in part to an extramarital affair with a Mississippi State employee.
Jake Mangum, the team’s go-to leader and ultra-competitive centerfielder, describes the team’s reaction to the Cannizaro news in another telling bit: “We heard all the rumors for a while. We’d known for a while. Then it went public. When it happened, we were like, ‘Let’s go!’”
Explaining how this team — one that started the year 14–15 and 2–7 in the SEC — is 2-0 in Omaha is not easy. But it starts with a staff of coaches who have not only grown accustomed to change but have thrived in it.
In two years in Starkville, Mike Brown and Henderson were working for second boss. John Cohen hired Brown as a volunteer coach, and Henderson as pitching coach about four months before he moved to athletic director.
Now Henderson has Mississippi State just one win away from reaching the College World Series finals. With just 39 wins this season, the Bulldogs are on the verge of potentially becoming one of the more unlikely College World Series finalists in recent memory.
Remember, this is a team that started the season 16-16 and entered the NCAA tournament 31-25. If Mississippi State wins its next game, Friday at 2 p.m. against Oregon State, the Bulldogs could set themselves up to have the lowest season win total for a national champion since Southern California (43-12-1) in 1968.
Since 1968, the average win total for the DI baseball national champion is 52.9, led by Wichita State's 68 wins in 1989. In the last 50 years, just 14 national champions have had less than 50 wins and four of those came before 1980, when the college baseball season featured fewer games than it does today.
This has been fun story to follow, but this is not necessarily a rags-to-riches tale — more of a down-but-not-out story because MSU has talent. You don’t go 11-1 against this year’s top eight national seeds and 8-0 against teams in the CWS field without talent. But there is no denying this is a magical run like, the likes of nothing we’ve seen before.
Dead in the water doesn’t even begin to describe these Bulldogs back in March.
“Starkville deserves a national championship,” State center fielder Jake Mangum said.
It would be such a celebratory final chapter of a story that opened with a flop.
