GLENN GUILBEAU, Tiger Rag Editor
OMAHA, Nebraska – It just feels like LSU has already won this national championship.
Just the details of how it will happen remain – starting at 6 p.m. Saturday when the Tigers (51-15) open the best-of-three national championship series at the College World Series against Coastal Carolina (56-11, and 26-0) at Charles Schwab Field.
LSU-COASTAL CAROLINA PODCAST PREVIEW
Game two will be Sunday at 1:30 p.m. on ABC, though they should consider moving it with temperatures projected to be as high as a Chase Shores fastball – 103 degrees with a heat index tipping 110. It will be in the 80s tonight and Sunday night. A third game – if necessary – will be on Monday (6:30 p.m., ESPN).
Coastal Carolina is a great team. You don’t win 26 straight if you’re not, regardless of the opponent. The Chanticleers could contend in the Southeastern Conference. They did sweep two in the Super Regional at Auburn, which swept three from LSU at Auburn in April.
Coastal Carolina pitcher throws some high heat at LSU?https://t.co/vvHKSuCZTu
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) June 20, 2025
But a first-year coach, Kevin Schnall, is leading them. He’s done a great job so far, and he was a top assistant and recruiter at the Conway, South Carolina, power for two decades before taking over for Gary Gilmore. It took Legend LSU coach Skip Bertman five trips to win it all. It took former LSU coach Paul Mainieri three trips with the first at Notre Dame before he won it in 2009. Present LSU coach Jay Johnson took three to take it in 2023 with the first two when he was at Arizona.
But Schnall’s real problem is he is going against the Alabama of college baseball in this LSU Lion, which has won seven national championships from 1991 through 2023. That’s one about every four years. No program has won more than that over that span. The closest is Oregon State with three from 2006-18.
LSU will be going for its 8th national title in 34 years under three coaches. Alabama Football has won eight national championships since 1992 with one by Gene Stallings that season and an incredible six by former coach Nick Saban in just 12 seasons from 2009-20.
From 1961 through 2020, Alabama won 14 with Bear Bryant winning six from 1961 through 1979.
What happens when a program wins that much is a feeling that it’s just going to pull out games most of the time some way. I covered Alabama just after the 1992 national title for the Mobile Press-Register and that sense just hung over the program like a red mist of power as it did when Bear ruled college football in the 1960s and ’70s the way John Wayne did Hollywood. You just knew Alabama was going to pull it out. Sometimes by not doing much at all and just watching the other team – Ole Miss, Auburn, LSU, Tennessee, whoever – just fold most of the time.
There were down times between Bryant and Stallings and again after Stallings until Saban, who became Bryant without the hat, cigarettes and whiskey, then lapped him because he did it so fast.
It’s been the same thing with LSU since, really, 1989, when Bertman’s Tigers somehow slayed No. 1 Texas A&M at Texas A&M twice in the same day to reach Omaha. Then he won five in 10 seasons from ’91 through 2000, and could’ve won it in 1998, 1989 and ’87 with slightly different circumstances.
There was a lapse between Bertman and Mainieri and in Mainieri’s last few years pre-Johnson, but Johnson appears on the verge of nearing Bertman.
The way LSU scored 3 in the 9th to beat Arkansas, 6-5, Wednesday “flooded me with, ‘I can’t believe we just did that.’”
— Glenn Guilbeau (@SportBeatTweet) June 20, 2025
-Jay Johnson:https://t.co/HJQLPJDSNe
Like Alabama, you just know somehow LSU is going to pull it out.
If you think comparing LSU Baseball to Alabama Football is a reach, UCLA coach John Savage reached higher after losing, 9-5, to LSU on Tuesday when his pitching gave up more runs than in any game in a month.
“They’re just a little bit higher level,” he said. “I don’t want to call them the Yankees, right? But they’re good.”
Look at LSU’s uncanny win over Arkansas on Wednesday night. Look at its cinematic Omaha history with the Walk-Off. It’s not just 1996 and Warren Morris, who naturally appeared on KETV Channel 7 in Omaha this morning in an interview on the giant Schwab video scoreboard as if he looks on high over all of Omaha. That home run never gets old, and it keeps feeding the LSU Dynasty incrementally as walk-offs beget walk-offs.
… 2025 – Facing a 5-3 deficit with one out and two on in the bottom of the ninth on Wednesday night against Arkansas, LSU gets new life when Razorback shortstop Wehiwa Aloy doesn’t go for a game-ending double play and gets the safe out at third. Then left fielder Charles Davalan slips on some purple and gold precipitation and misses a catchable line drive from Luis Hernandez. The ball bounces like a Jell-O shot into the corner, and two runs score to tie it 5-5. Then Jared Jones just gets a line drive off the glove of second baseman Cam Kozeal for the walk-off RBI single.
The win reminds Johnson and LSU players of their 6-3 win over Tennessee last April 25 after trailing 3-0 entering the bottom of the ninth. Jones walked that one off, too, with a three-run home run.
“That’s how you win here,” Johnson said. “When your best players are playing their best. I think we found a sweet spot to this team. How the game transpired and the end of it, it kind of flooded me with, like, ‘I can’t believe we just did that.'”
That’s how Bertman felt after the Morris home run in 1996. In all, LSU had five previous walk-off wins in Omaha before the Arkansas game Wednesday:
… 2023 – Tommy White hits a two-run home run in the 11th to beat No. 1 overall seed Wake Forest, 2-0, and put LSU in the national championship series, and LSU beat Florida two of three to win their seventh national title.
“You’re lucky if you get one of those nights in your entire life,” Johnson said as he compared White’s home run to Jones’ hit Wednesday. “And I have two like that in a three-year span. Like, I couldn’t believe it, honestly.”
… 2008 – Blake Dean hits a walk-off, three-run RBI double in the ninth to beat Rice, 6-5, in an elimination game to snap a five-game Omaha losing streak and set up Mainieri’s 2009 championship.
… 2000 – Brad Cresse’s walk-off RBI single in the ninth scores Ryan Theriot from second for a 6-5 win over Stanford for Bertman’s final national championship and fifth in 10 seasons a year before he retires.
… 1996 – Warren Morris’ two-out, two-run home run in the ninth beats Miami, 9-8, in one of the greatest moments in all of sports history. After struggling to recover from a broken hamate bone in his wrist for several weeks and mostly bunting when he did play, Morris just happened to wake up on Saturday morning game day that June 8 finally feeling 100 percent. Not making these up.
… 1993 – Todd Walker’s RBI single gives LSU a 6-5 win over Long Beach State in an elimination game to put it in the championship game, where it beats Wichita State, 8-0, the next day for Bertman’s second national title.
Alabama Football has a history of just pulling out games out of nowhere at times. So does LSU Baseball.
Yes, Skip is to Bear what Jay could be to Nick.
Bertman won his first national title in 1991 at age 53 and his fifth at 62. Bryant won his first at 48 in 1961 and sixth in 1979 at 66. Saban won his first at LSU in 2003 at 52 and his sixth at Alabama (seventh overall) in 2020 at 69.
Johnson will win his second on Sunday or Monday at age 48. He would have 12 years to win three more to equal Bertman. And Johnson is more like Saban, and talks about him – not as much as he does Bertman – but every now and then. They have similar possessed work ethics that normal people, including some of the best coaches, just don’t have.
Johnson’s work on this team is truly all but done but the last details.
“Literally, everything we’re doing is an extension of how we got here in the first place,” he said. “I’ve got good faith in that. They know who to be, when they need to be it, where they need to be it, and how they need to be it. These guys have that. This is a model team. The team’s best quality is its consistency to commit to what needs to be done on a daily basis. I think for our team, I don’t believe there’s anything we have not seen.”
LSU can win with power or with small ball.
“I would say this is a really battle-tested team,” right fielder Jake Brown said. “We played in just about every type of game from blowing people out, to getting beat, to coming back in games, to winning by just one run. I think it speaks to the toughness of our team. There’s no lead we can’t come back from.”
LSU has played the best, and beat most of them.
“High-level pitching, high-level bullpen, high-level defense, offenses with speed, power, hitting skills,” Johnson said. “I think we’re very prepared. And we’ll just leave it at that.”
Now they just have to finish final exams. Johnson and his players are like model 4.0 students who study consistently every day all semester and do not cram for the final, because they don’t need to. They already know it. That’s how they got here in the first place.
Johnson said it best on Thursday at the Embassy Suites team hotel:
“I have zero concerns of readiness for the game on Saturday.”
LSU has already won this national championship, like Alabama won so many before kickoff.
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