OMAHA, Neb. — Three hundred and seven.
That’s the number of NCAA Division I baseball teams that began the season back in February, all with a dream of ending up here. In the College World Series.
Only two remain.
Just one will be on top when it’s all over.
A show of hands, please, LSU Tigers and Coastal Carolina Chanticleers, if you believe you are the chosen ones.
Oh. Both of you, huh?
Not surprised. Not the way both of these teams got to the CWS championship series.
The Tigers and Chanticleers go into Game 1 on Saturday night convinced they are destined to win. Convinced that Excalibur has touched them on the shoulder to signify they are the chosen ones.
The way they got here, why would they not?
LSU has been the comeback Tigers in 2025, the self-styled Cardiac Cats. Eight times this season they’ve battled back to win from a three-run deficit or more. Wednesday night here against Arkansas, LSU was down two with two outs in the bottom of the ninth but rallied for three runs to win 6-5. Only once in 269 previous instances this season had a team done that in the same circumstances.
Remember Little Rock? The underwhelming Trojans who got hot in their conference tournament and nearly torched LSU’s dreams of Omaha with a 10-4 shocker in the Baton Rouge regional? Since then, the Tigers are 6-0, including one of those huge comeback wins, rallying from 5-1 down in the regional final to beat Little Rock 10-6.
Do the Tigers believe? You bet Ted Lasso’s mustache they do.
“They’re built a little bit different,” ESPN college baseball analyst Kyle Peterson said after Wednesday’s game. “When it continues to happen over and over and over again, obviously you start to think you are a little bit different.”
Peterson could have been speaking in the same breath about Coastal Carolina. If LSU fans think of the Chanticleers as a slightly more souped-up version of Little Rock, they do so at their own peril.
Coastal Carolina has won 26 straight games, the longest winning streak by any team ever entering the CWS final. Sunday will mark two months (two months!) since the Chanticleers’ last defeat, 4-2 at College of Charleston. That night, College of Charleston’s coach, Chad Holbrook, ambled over to the Coastal dugout after that game and told the dejected Chanticleers they wouldn’t lose again.
Nostradamus couldn’t have seen Coastal coming, but Holbrook did. Now the Chanticleers look in the mirror and see an unstoppable force, and everyone else is the movable object.
“I mean, we're not really worried about the Tigers,” Coastal second baseman Blake Barthol said. “We're more of just a self-oriented team. We're just focused on our team and our team only.”
If you’re wondering whether the Chanticleers come into this series with proverbial chips on their shoulders, you can stop at the end of this sentence. They do. When asked what he likes about LSU as a team, this was pitcher Jacob Morrison’s reply:
“Not a whole lot.”
On the other side, LSU third baseman Michael Braswell was more than willing to give Coastal Carolina its due as a great team.
Just the second-greatest team still playing.
“We respect Coastal Carolina,” Braswell said. “They have a national championship. They beat coach (Jay) Johnson. What they’ve done this year is impressive. We’re excited to play them.
“We’re LSU. We’re the Los Angeles Dodgers or the Yankees, whatever you want to call it. We have a target on our back. If they want to be the champs, they’ve got to beat the champs.”
The Chanticleers beat the champs back in 2016. They won a super regional at LSU, in two games, then battled out of the loser’s bracket in the CWS to beat Johnson’s first team during his six-year stint at Arizona in a three-game championship series.
To think that there is revenge on the mind of the Tigers or their coach at this point is absurd. Most players on both teams weren't even teenagers when that happened. Johnson was at a different school. Coastal coach Kevin Schnall was an assistant for the Chanticleers then, but that’s about where those ties end.
Coastal can pitch exceptionally well, can get the timely hit, fields at exactly the same lofty clip as LSU (.981) and has taken more hit by pitches (176) than any team in Division I history. But LSU — after coming through the Southeastern Conference, the SEC Tournament and the two games here against a top-tier SEC team in Arkansas — has quite literally had the best thrown at it. Many, many times.
“I think if you're at this point in the NCAA Tournament,” Johnson said, “you've been battle-tested. I think that's just the way that it is. I don't believe there's anything we have not seen.
“What I mean by that is high-level pitching, high-level bullpen, high-level defense, offenses with speed, power, hitting skills, know how to play the game, move the offense. I think we're very prepared. And we'll just leave it at that.”
Being at LSU, this is the expectation, to be here at the end of the year competing for a national championship.
But not just competing. Winning. Bringing home championship No. 8.
“The job’s not finished,” first baseman Jared Jones said.
That’s one thing both the Tigers and Chanticleers can agree on.
