Coach, while we were gone...

[messageboardsuperhero]

I heard somewhere that we have a home-and-home set up with Arizona in baseball for 2014 and 2015.

This might be old news, but we were talking about how our OOC schedule needed to be tougher next year to help our RPI and you suggested calling up Byrne and getting something set up with Arizona. With our weaker conference schedule, it looks like the Tyler Bratton and the coaches have decided to step up the scheduling at the right time like we were hoping.

[Todd4State]

Personally, I would prefer to play Arizona State, but whatever. With our SEC schedule next year, we need to play someone with a high RPI because we go from having the SEC schedule of death to playing the worst three SEC East teams. And then we have Ole Miss, Arkansas, and A&M in Starkville, and then Bama, Auburn, and LSU on the road. I honestly don't think it's out of the realm of possibility to see us winning every SEC series other than maybe LSU next year. Basically I think LT is trying to screw us since he actually helped us by jacking up our RPI with our schedule, so I think he's trying to pull an Arkansas on us. However, no way in hell are we going to schedule seven OOC games against Valley and New Orleans. That killed them as much as anything.

I'm all for playing a "name" team OOC once a year. I was serious about playing Virginia down the road, and my dream OOC tournament would be MSU, USCw, Texas, and Miami in Starkville. I'd also like to play Tulane on the road on a weekend, and schedule Army OOC.

And with that new stadium being built in Biloxi- I'm sure we'll start playing a game or two down there as well. I like playing Ole Miss and USM at Trustmark Park though. But maybe we could play South Alabama in Biloxi or someone like that.

[Sandman14]

Tulane and Army? I was with you until then..

[messageboardsuperhero]

Yeah, just whoever happens to be expecting to have the highest RPI that particular year would be nice.

I think the point remains though that we need to step up OOC scheduling next year. If you look at it right now, literally every team in the top 16 RPI hosted a regional. That's how huge RPI is in the minds of the selection committee. If one of our goals next year is to be a national seed (and that should be one of our goals), we've got to shoot for a top 8 RPI. To do that, we'll probably need a SOS in the top 25 range, and we're not going to get there next year on only our in conference schedule like we could this year. If I was setting up the schedule, I'd try to keep games against RPI 150 type teams to a reasonably minimal level and try to cancel as many pre-scheduled games as I could against RPI 200+ teams.

And I agree about how we play in-conference next year. I'm hoping for 20+ wins.