Georgia baseball doing what basketball couldn’t: save their coach
Georgia baseball is 22-7 and 7-2 in SEC play after beating Georgia tech and winning a series with Texas A&M. The Bulldogs are in the top-25 of every major poll and one poll has them ranked no. 8.
Entering the 2017-18 college sports season, Georgia had two coaches on the hot seat. Georgia basketball coach Mark Fox and Georgia baseball coach Scott Stricklin. Both needed to take the Dawgs to their respective NCAA Tournaments. Their situations were as similar as they were simple. Win you stay, lose you leave.
Fox and the basketball team couldn’t get Georgia in the big dance. Seeing them sweep Florida and Tennessee made the loses to other teams mind-boggling. Fox’s seat got hotter every week. The boiling point was not getting selected to a spot in the tournament. In response, Georgia and Fox parted ways early last month and Greg McGarity sealed a deal with Tom Crean.
Georgia baseball however, is a different story. In fact, Stricklin’s once smoking hot seat now seems pretty comfortable. The Bulldogs are rolling through SEC play. Through three series’, Georgia is 7-2. They swept South Carolina last weekend and they throttled a top-20 Texas A&M team this past weekend.
Besides an ugly road trip to Charleston a month ago, Georgia has played phenomenal baseball. Their 22-7 record reflects that. They picked up another signature win tonight, 4-0 against Georgia Tech in front of a sellout Foley Field crowd. The Dawgs have achieved a shutout in four of their last six games.
There is still a lot of baseball to play. Georgia travels to Nashville to play a great Vanderbilt this weekend. They still have Kentucky and Florida on the schedule. But at the rate they’re going, Georgia is going to be in the middle of the SEC Championship picture. They’ll secure a spot in the tournament. A College World Series trip isn’t out of the question either.
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This team knows what they’re playing for and they respond with a great sense of urgency. They know Stricklin’s job is on the line. They know fans are tired of mediocrity in Georgia baseball. You can see that there’s a want out of these boys to get the program back to where it was a decade ago. That’s just fun to watch.