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Ryan McGee
OMAHA, Neb. — On a hair dryer of a Sunday afternoon in the town that every June becomes de facto Baton Rouge North, the LSU Tigers didn’t merely win a Men’s College World Series national championship. Nor was it merely their eighth overall.
The title they really won was that of Greatest Ever College Baseball Program.
“I don’t think there’s anyone here that’s going to argue with you on that,” said designated hitter Ethan Frey, from Rosepine, Louisiana, pointing to the 24,734 decidedly Cajun fans as they sang along to Garth Brooks’ “Callin’ Baton Rouge.” “What I know is that when we go to work every day, we do it trying to make the Tigers that came before us proud. Hopefully we have. They built it. We build on that.”
The building where they do that work, Alex Box Stadium, is draped in trophies and artifacts that are all evidence for their best-ever argument. All over the building where they did their work on Sunday, Charles Schwab Field, it is easier to find LSU photos and logos commemorating so many Tigers moments in Omaha than it is to find a hot dog.
“This city feels like home to us,” said former LSU coach Skip Bertman, sitting in a wheelchair on the field, confetti scattered over his shoulders as he shook hands with the players as they came off the stage where they had just received their trophies. He is the man who pulled LSU baseball out of the swamp of irrelevance in the 1980s. “When we come here, we bring a lot of folks from home, but there are also so many people who live here that wear our colors because they grew up watching us play during so many summers. That’s special.”
LSU does not own the record for most national championship rings. That belongs to USC. But none of the Trojans’ dozen championships have come during this century. Their last win was in 1998, and that was their first in 20 years. No one will ever replicate what head coach Rod Dedeaux’s teams did, winning seven of their titles during an 11-year span from 1968 to 1978. But Bertman’s teams won five in 10 years, between 1991 and 2000. Now current head coach Jay Johnson, who has said the best part of the job is his friendship with Bertman, has won two in three seasons.
LSU hasn’t won the most MCWS games. That mark is owned by Texas, with 88 to LSU’s 47, which ranks fifth all time. But the Horns hooked the last of their six national titles a full two decades ago, and their last finals appearance was in 2009. Today’s Texas program is very good. LSU’s is great.
The Tigers own none of the Omaha longevity records, such as that all-time win total or number of appearances made (20, ranked fifth). As the innings wound down on Sunday, the purple and gold crowd that crammed into the shade of the Charles Schwab Field concourse stood beneath a series of massive wall plaques commemorating the teams that have participated in and won every MCWS played in Omaha, beginning in 1950, that line the entire cavernous hallway. The listings, five years at a time, begin down the first-base line and continue all the way around to third. Not until past the halfway point do you see the first LSU logo. And that’s what makes the Tigers’ unparalleled run of college baseball success so, well, unparalleled.
USC made its first appearance in 1948, and Texas made its debut one year later, participants in the last two Series played before the event was moved to Omaha. They have compiled their prodigious numbers over the span of 75-plus summers. LSU didn’t crash the party until 1986. It won its first title five years later.
So, all that the Tigers have accomplished has taken place over a lengthy yet comparatively compressed period of time. And that makes their résumé all the more impressive.
Those 20 Omaha visits, those eight national titles, that 8-1 record in MCWS finals, those 47 MCWS wins, have all happened over the span of 40 years, which have also happened to be the most tumultuous, shift-changing, impossible-to-predict decades when it comes to doing business in any collegiate sport, but especially college baseball.
And we haven’t yet mentioned the conference regular-season and tournament titles — 12 of each — won in the baseball battle royale that is the SEC, a Frankenstein created in a laboratory that LSU helped construct. Oh, and did we tell you that the Tigers have been led to Omaha by four different coaches, three of whom won national titles.
“I think that adaptability is underrated as a key to long-term success, and frankly, when you have had success, it is so much harder to convince yourself to make changes as you go,” said Ben McDonald, the program’s first truly transcendent superstar. The righty led the Tigers to two of their earliest Omaha appearances, and in the midst of the second visit was drafted first overall by the Baltimore Orioles. The next superstar was 2023 MCWS hero hurler Paul Skenes. “You’re thinking, ‘Why would we change what we are doing? What we’ve been doing is working!’ But Jay is the perfect example of a guy who understands how the game works now. How the transfer portal works. How to coach kids of this generation. Just like Skip did.”
There have been challenges. When Bertman retired and became full-time athletic director in 2001, he chose longtime assistant Smoke Laval as his successor. Laval got the team back to Omaha twice but never won a title and failed to make the NCAA tourney field in his last season. Bertman still says that dismissing his friend was the most difficult time of his career. Paul Mainieri made the program an Omaha regular again and won the 2009 national championship, but his era ended with a polite but difficult departure. Johnson, who has been a Division I college head coach since 2014, has deftly navigated the spaghetti pile of roster construction that is the transfer portal/NIL age.
After winning the 2023 MCWS, LSU lost 13 players to pro baseball, an SEC record. Last year there were eight LSU pitchers drafted. The team started this season with a largely new roster, and it took a while to jell, going 19-11 in conference play. It’s largely forgotten now, but the Tigers spent the first round of this NCAA tournament in a wrestling match with regional 4-seed Little Rock.
But when it clicked, it clicked. And LSU won the national title by going 2-0 against a Coastal Carolina team that had won 26 in a row. The same team that suddenly cut LSU’s longtime four-run lead to only two in the closing frames of Sunday’s contest, even after the Chanticleers had lost their head coach to a first-inning ejection.
“They had to make us sweat a little bit, didn’t they?” Bertman, 87, said with a laugh. “But in the end, they added to the legacy. And it sure feels like Jay has them in a position to keep adding to it for a while to come.”
Everything they do now is just more icing on the King Cake. College baseball’s kings. A crown that now feels indisputable.
