USC baseball will be good in 2015, but how good?
With college baseball season starting in two weeks, many South Carolina fans are trying to get a handle on just how good the 2015 team might be.
If they take a look at the preseason rankings, they might come away a little confused. As always, the Gamecocks are expected to be one of the better teams in the country. No real surprise there given their 15 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances and 40-win seasons.
In the five polls released to this point, USC has garnered a Top 25 ranking in all of them – not bad considering more than 300 schools field NCAA Division I baseball teams.
The question really comes down to this each season: Are the Gamecocks just NCAA regional-good? Are they Super Regional-good? Or are they College World Series-good?
The national championships won in 2010 and 2011 have some believing they should be CWS-good every single season. Reality says something different. It just isn’t that easy to do – even for a perennial power with 11 trips to Omaha in program history.
The various preseason rankings reflect some of that uncertainty. From highest to lowest, the Gamecocks are ranked No. 5 by D1Baseball.com, No. 10 by the USA Today coaches poll, No. 13 by Baseball America, No. 14 by Perfect Game and No. 21 by Collegiate Baseball. The National Collegiate Baseball Writers Association poll has not come out yet.
(The State primarily uses the Baseball America ranking because of that publication’s 35 years of in-depth coverage of the sport from the high school ranks to the major leagues.)
There’s at least one guy who takes issue with D1Baseball.com's optimism. That would be USC coach Chad Holbrook, whose team didn't survive a home regional last season and then lost catcher Grayson Greiner, top starter Jordan Montgomery, third baseman Joey Pankake, closer Joel Seddon, and center fielder Tanner English in the first 11 rounds of the MLB draft.
“I think that’s a bit of a stretch,” Holbrook said last week. “We’re not the fifth-best team in the country come January. I can assure you, as we sit here right now, that’s not where we are.”
Of course, Holbrook hopes that’s where his team can be at the end of May, when the NCAA tournament gets going. It’s always better for a team to be playing its best baseball heading in the most important part of the season, and Holbrook understands he’ll need the early part of this season to figure out which players will step up to fill the holes left by the departed standouts.
The rankings also show there’s probably not a whole lot of difference between many of the teams that reside in any Top 25. How much of a difference is there really between No. 5 and No. 10 and No. 20 before the first game has been played?
People like rankings because they provide weekly snapshots of how a team’s season is shaping up, and they serve as conversation pieces about which teams look to be the best as conference races and postseason positioning heat up. But the truth is they don’t matter a whole lot in the big scheme of things, and fans who get too worked up over where their team is ranked should relax.
By the end of the season, all that really matters is a team’s RPI, the quality of its wins (and losses) and the strength of its schedule. That’s where the NCAA tournament selection committee puts its focus, and the postseason tournament is the only true way to sort out which team is the best.
So it’s really tough to tell if the Gamecocks will ultimately end up somewhere between No. 5 and No. 21 – or even above or below that – until 56 games are played. I’m ready to start watching and find out.
This story was originally published January 30, 2015 at 4:28 PM with the headline "USC baseball will be good in 2015, but how good?."