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1. College football appears poised to move to a 16-team playoff after this current contract cycle expires after the 2025 season. What will the format look like? There are questions.
The next meeting to discuss that is in June. The best guess is an expansion to the current 14-team field proposal, which would grant four bids for the SEC, four for the Big Ten, two each for the Big 12 and the ACC, one for the highest-ranked champion from the six other FBS conferences and one spot that would essentially be an at-large bid.
Both the Big Ten and the SEC have discussed using the additional automatic bids in a 16-team field to reconfigure their championship weekends. The common belief is the leagues are leaning to a play-in format that would pit No. 3 versus No. 6 and No. 4 versus No. 5, with the winners advancing to the CFP.
The 16-team field would allow the ACC and Big 12 some creativity. One popular idea is The Big 12 and ACC’s third AQs in a 4-4-3-3-1-1 model would have to reach a minimum selection-committee ranking — possibly No. 18 — to make the CFP. If not, those would become at-large spots, open to teams from any conference.
However, the idea of eight first-round games — which would make the most sense — has no traction. Instead, there is a proposal that would pit No. 13 vs. No. 16 and No. 14 versus No. 15, with the winners advancing to the 14-team field. The top two seeds would get byes to the quarterfinals.
It’s an idea that is being ridiculed.
I side with those criticizing the format proposals. This can be simplified. Seed teams 1-16 and then play the damned tournament. All of the manipulated drama is going to begin to ruin the regular season. At some point, logic and common sense should rule the day.
Of course, we’re talking college athletics here.
2. Greg Sankey made an appearance on the SEC Network’s broadcast of Ole Miss versus Vanderbilt Sunday.
I was in Hoover covering the game, but I was told he said collective bargaining isn’t the fix for college athletics. He’s right.
The SEC’s athletics directors, presidents and coaches will gather in Destin, Fla., this week for meetings. They’ll almost certainly argue about how to reign in some of the craziness that is making their day-to-day lives complicated.
I’ll tune it out, I suspect. It’s just noise. The only “fix” is self-discipline.
Good luck with that.
3. A record-tying eight SEC baseball programs were selected among 16 regional hosts for the NCAA Baseball Tournament, according to an announcement Sunday by the NCAA Division I Baseball Committee. Eight SEC teams were also selected as hosts in 2023.
The eight SEC schools named as NCAA Regional hosts are: Arkansas, Auburn, Georgia, LSU, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Texas and Vanderbilt. They will begin play in the NCAA Tournament Friday, May 30. The full 64-team field, top-16 national seeds, first round regional pairings and site assignments will be announced Monday at 11 a.m. CT on ESPN2.
Each regional will consist of four teams playing in a double-elimination format. Regional winners will advance to best-of-three Super Regionals, with those eight winners advancing to the College World Series.
The other eight regional hosts are: North Carolina, Clemson, Coastal Carolina, Oregon, Oregon State, Southern Miss, UCLA and Florida State.
That, obviously, was a press release from the SEC. After spending three of the last four days in Hoover, I’ll simply say SEC baseball has never been better. The level of pitching, across the league, is elite. If the SEC has fewer than four teams in Omaha, I’ll be shocked.
“It’s a great training ground for Omaha,” LSU’s Jared Jones said Saturday following his team’s 2-0 loss to Ole Miss. “It’s a 30-game playoff in the SEC. You have to go out there and every game counts the same and then obviously here in the SEC Tournament, you’re playing for a chance to host a regional and a super regional and, even even better, win a tournament. That’s something I didn’t get to do while I was at LSU, but it’s on to the next one with a regional and whatever else is ahead of us.”
“When you look at what’s ahead of us, we won’t see anything we haven’t seen from a talent perspective,” LSU coach Jay Johnson added. “I thought 15 of the 16 teams could compete to probably go to Omaha this year. That’s because the talent on the field makes it a very competitive environment and I think our team, how they handled the schedule and the consistency with which they did, should play with great confidence going forward and that’s what I expect them to do.”
4. Sunday’s finale marked the end of the first 16-team SEC Tournament, the first year that the entire event has been single elimination.
“It was kind of a split vote, I think, for the coaches,” Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco said. “We’ve always had the best tournament in the country because of Hoover, because of the importance of all the things I've mentioned just a few minutes ago.
“I was a little nervous about it, to be honest with you, but the crowds were great. The teams that have had the best years, the top four seeds and then the next four seeds, were rewarded for that, and they should in our league because it's such a gauntlet to get through those ten weeks. I would think it was a huge success.
“It's one where it's a little more digestible. I think that's what people liked. You've got all 16 teams here. I think it was '19 that we played on Tuesday and made it to Sunday; that's a long week, and you spend a lot of pitchers and you worry about that.
“So this may be the happy sweet spot, if you will. But I thought it was an overall success.”
Vanderbilt’s Tim Corbin basically agreed.
“For me, it was kind of wait and see,” Corbin said. “I’ve never done it before. The kids hadn't done it before. I just wanted to see how it played out. The one thing is my concern and my concern at the meeting when we were talking about it was the crowds. The crowds were outstanding.
“I think for a team that finishes in the top four, you're really doing yourself a favor because it sets up like a normal weekend moving forward and moving back. So that part for us was great. We got to play Thursday, Saturday and Sunday.
"It sure as hell beats practicing and training back home. You know, 13,000 people, 14,000 people, you folks, the TV cameras, the temperature of the weather, the temperature of the games, that helps you moving forward.
“So these guys have been a mature team. They will handle this in the way they need to handle it. They want to have fun in doing all of this, but we've got a lot of baseball ahead of us, and we can't wait to play. But this tournament has been outstanding. Obviously we won so it's easy for me to say that right now, but I just feel like the games were -- it's great to be here.
“There's not one day -- they know how I feel about this tournament. I have a tremendous amount of gratitude for it, to think that we're in this conference and playing baseball at this level with people that care, people that care about watching you. There's not a conference tournament in the country that comes close to this. So we're fortunate. We're fortunate people.”
5. Ole Miss earned one of the 16 regional host sites late Sunday. The Rebels will learn their specific seed — the bet here is 10-12 — and the rest of the field coming to Oxford Monday at 11 a.m. CDT.
Ole Miss enters the 64-team tournament feeling very good about itself, as it should. The Rebels defeated Florida, Arkansas and LSU before falling to Vanderbilt, 3-2, in Sunday’s title game. Ole Miss pitcher Hunter Elliott was asked what he learned about his team in Hoover. His answer, I thought, was illuminating.
“I don't know that I've learned a ton,” Elliott said. "I think other people are kind of starting to see what we already knew. I mean, we've known we're really good for a long time.
“What I guess maybe I've learned is that we're playing really good baseball right now, and that's a positive this time of year because this is when you want to be playing your best baseball.”
“We’ve liked our team all year long,” Bianco added minutes later. “We liked our team at the very beginning and it's a team that's played a really consistent year. Not a lot of ups and downs. I've said it throughout the week, similar questions.
“This is a team that there's been certain games that we haven't played well and certain weekends we haven't played well, but the team hasn't been swept all year. We've been pretty consistent, and we've had a bad game or bad weekend, this team has responded.
“So I say all of that because this was a confident group coming in here. But when you're on this stage and you're playing these teams day in, day out, and I think that's one of the cool things about this tournament that's probably not talked about a lot. It's just the publicity, the media that's here, the importance that's put on this stage and you look over to the course of the week and watch how guys pitch in this environment, hit in this environment, this really prepares you. There's no other league through the ten-week gauntlet and then of course this weekend or week here in Hoover that prepares you more for postseason.
“So I know we're disappointed in the outcome today, but we also really did club the No. 1 RPI team in the country I was told prior to the game. So I'm sure they kept that standing with the win today, and we just came up a little bit short. But I feel really good about our club. We'll get over this. We'll shower well and we'll be ready for next weekend.”
6. There is a lot of parity in college baseball, so who knows, Ole Miss might get bounced this weekend in Oxford.
But I won’t be surprised if this team ends its season in Omaha at the College World Series. It has a “feel” to it that is difficult to describe. The games I saw in Hoover were the first college games I’ve seen in person in six years, but there was an aura around the Rebels that I noticed.
“I really think the biggest think the biggest thing the pitching staff has been doing lately is really, really hanging out together and coming together for the most part,” Ole Miss relief pitcher Connon Spencer said. “We’re always hanging out with each other, even outside the field, and we’re not just teammates. We’re buddies. And I think that really helps for encouraging guys whenever they go out there. You also get a realization for what makes people tick and you can say the right things to them to get them in their right head space to go and compete the way they've been doing all week.”
“We're really together,” Ole Miss first baseman Will Furniss added. “The last couple years it doesn't seem like we've had a bunch of fight, and when we'd get down we'd just kind of give up or we'd ride the ups and downs too much. We stay even-keeled
“This group is older and I think we're honestly tighter. When things go bad, we don't dip too low, and when things are going good, we don't go too high. I think that's the recipe for success, like Coach B says. Just a very mature group of guys, and we're all kind of like family. It's good to have this group with us.”
7. Spencer’s consistency at the back end of the bullpen is something that gives his teammates confidence.
He closed games against Florida, Arkansas and LSU in Hoover, and given the Rebels’ strong pitching down the stretch, Spencer looming for the final innings should spur fear in opponents.
”Oh, it's awesome,” Furniss said. "Offenses sometimes joke around, as long as we have the lead going into the ninth we're going to be good because we've got this guy in the bullpen. It's really comforting, especially seeing him jog out of the bullpen. "Enter Sandman" comes on; that's freaking sweet. It's cool. It's a cool song and it gets me pumped up, and I know it gets him pumped up, too, but not only that, he's really good up there. I don't really know many pitchers that can just throw fastballs and shove it down somebody's throat, especially the good teams that we face, but he can do it, and he does it every time.”
As a whole, the Rebels’ pitching staff seems to be finding its groove just in time.
“Obviously the credit goes to the players,” Bianco said. ‘They’re the ones out there throwing and performing.
“But a lot of credit has got to go to (pitching coach) Joel Mangrum. We said it yesterday in the press conference here, how well we've pitched it down the stretch, and not even down the stretch, like a week or two, but how strong we've been on the mound the second half of conference play on both sides from the starting pitchers to the bullpen and even with an injury to Braden Jones; we've been able to sustain that.
“They just continue to get better and better. I think Spence is real sincere in that they're close, they pull for one another, and that's neat. There's a lot of guys in baseball that that staff you're going to hand the ball off to a lot of different people, and knowing that you have each other's back sometimes makes the biggest difference in the world.”
8. Of course, the postseason is a different animal. One bad game can put a team on the brink. A hitting slump can end a season. At the end of the day, all a team can do is try to be itself.
“We just want to continue to play well,” Bianco said. ‘I know it sounds like coachspeak, but it's really not about who you're playing. We feel we're pretty good, as well, and when we play well, we can play with anybody in the country.
“One of the things that we've talked about for a long time now is can we play consistently well over a period of time. Baseball is a tough game to do that. But this team has done it now for a few weeks.”
“I think it starts with the older guys, especially the four Mississippi guys, Spence included. But along with Elliott, (Riley) Maddox and (Austin) Nichols, four old guys that could have been drafted and sign and moved on last year decided to come back. Three of them have a national ring. Three of them were in that dugout in Omaha in '22.
“I think the last couple years have left -- with a lot of people — a real bitter taste in their mouths, and they didn't want to go out that way. They've made it their mission because in '22 they were freshmen. Now they're the old guys.
“So I credit them with the great leadership, but then also a lot of other guys, (Austin) Fawley and (Ryan) Moerman and (Isaac) Humphrey and (Mitchell) Sanford and other guys that came from other programs that have meshed into this culture and this team, and not only have been great teammates but also have showed leadership, and leadership comes in a lot of different ways. …Older teams win in our league. This is an old team.”
9. It’s time to eat. Here’s our resident Parisian chef, Burton Webb, with Taste of the Place, Lesson Lesson 289 — Grilled Shrimp & Polenta with Warm Tomato-Olive Relish.
A dish that feels like a seaside escape—grilled shrimp served over creamy, Parmesan-infused polenta and topped with a warm, briny tomato-olive relish. Perfect for a light, celebratory spring lunch.
The Chef’s Tidbits
— Quick-Cooking Elegance: Shrimp cook in minutes—great for entertaining without stress.
— Relish = Secret Weapon: The tomato-olive topping adds savory punch and Mediterranean charm.
— Polenta Tips: Whisk slowly, season generously, and finish with cheese or butter for silkiness.
Things You Will Need:
Serving: 4–6 people Prep Time: 25 minutes Cooking Time: 30 minutes
Utensils Needed:
Saucepan for polenta Grill or grill pan Skillet (for relish) Mixing bowls and a whisk
Ingredients Needed:
1 lb (450g) large shrimp, peeled and deveined 1 tbsp olive oil 1 tsp lemon zest Salt, pepper, and chili flakes to taste
For the Polenta:
1 cup polenta or coarse cornmeal 4 cups water or chicken broth 2 tbsp butter ½ cup grated Parmesan Salt & pepper to taste
For the Tomato-Olive Relish:
1 tbsp olive oil 1 shallot, finely chopped 1 garlic clove, minced 1 cup cherry tomatoes, halved ¼ cup black or green olives, sliced 1 tbsp capers 1 tbsp red wine vinegar Fresh parsley to finish Mise en Place:
— Marinate shrimp in olive oil, lemon zest, chili flakes, salt and pepper—set aside for 15 min.
— Boil water or broth for polenta.
— Prep tomatoes, olives, shallot, and garlic.
Cooking Instructions:
Step 1: Make the Polenta
— Slowly whisk polenta into simmering broth.
— Cook on low, stirring often, 20–25 minutes until thick and creamy.
— Stir in butter and Parmesan. Season to taste.
Step 2: Make the Relish
— In a skillet, heat olive oil. Sauté shallot and garlic 2 min.
— Add tomatoes and cook until softened (5–6 min).
— Stir in olives, capers, and vinegar. Warm through.
Step 3: Grill the Shrimp
— Heat grill or pan to medium-high. Grill shrimp 2–3 minutes per side until opaque.
Final Step & Presentation:
Spoon creamy polenta onto each plate. Top with shrimp and a generous spoonful of the warm relish. Garnish with fresh parsley and a lemon wedge.
From the Mississippian in Paris! Bon appétit!
10. I’ll have coverage of Ole Miss baseball, football recruiting and whatever else comes up this week on RebelGrove.com. Until then, here are some links of interest to me — and hopefully, to you — for your reading pleasure:
Thunder’s Chet Holmgren comes home to Minnesota, the place he learned to be himself
For Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and his NBA MVP rise, a childhood dream became reality
How Dansby Swanson sees his impact on the field — and in the Chicago Cubs’ front office
Rosenthal: Would the Pirates trade Paul Skenes? A fascinating but unlikely idea for now
Presenting the MLB All-Quarter Century Team, the very best in baseball since 2000
Two former Seahawks stars challenged each other. They show how relationships really grow
Rafael Nadal’s French Open ceremony brings Federer, Djokovic and Murray back to Roland Garros
Are we witnessing the end of the Premier League’s ‘Big Six’ hierarchy?
Manchester United have had darker days but I’ve never felt so low about them
