By Parrish Alford
Success in the college baseball spotlight depends on your stars, Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco says.
Timely contributions from surprise players across the roster help too.
The Rebels had both over the weekend, winning a second NCAA road regional in five years and returning to a familiar postseason spot under Bianco – a super regional.
Rested after a 3-0 run through the Lincoln Regional, Ole Miss is two wins away from a College World Series berth.
The Rebels play at No. 4 national seed Auburn Friday night at 7 Central on ESPN2 and Saturday at 4 Central on ESPN. They’ll play a third game on Sunday if necessary.
Regional No. 2 seed Ole Miss advanced late Sunday night when Dom Decker, who starred for Murray State in the Ole Miss heartbreak of the Oxford Regional in 2025, drove home freshman Cannon Goldin with a sacrifice fly – the second of the game for Decker – with one out in the 10th inning to defeat the 3 seed, Arizona State 5-4.
The Rebels defeated the Sun Devils 7-6 in 14 innings on the first day of regional play, beat host Nebraska 6-3 in a game that was delayed overnight Saturday and finished late Sunday morning.
Arizona State had been called the most dangerous No. 3 seed among the regionals by Baseball America because of a Sun Devils’ offense led by player of the year finalist Landon Hairston.
Arizona State scored 17 runs against South Dakota State and 11 against Nebraska in its regional wins, but Ole Miss starters and relievers kept the Sun Devils from disastrous innings. Against the Rebels, the Sun Devils were 2-for-18 with runners in scoring position over the two meetings.
“In a regional you need your stars to be stars and show up, but the team as a whole, you also need some other guys, who were maybe a different role, to have that star-like weekend,” said Bianco, who won his 1,000th career game in 2024.
Ole Miss got gutsy pitching from starters Hunter Elliott, of Tupelo, Taylor Rabe and Cade Townsend, but some down-the-line bullpen pieces carried the day in Game 3 as Will Libbert threw three hitless, scoreless innings, and J.P. Robertson, the former Germantown standout, threw two scoreless frames to set up Decker’s winning sacrifice fly.
“We could have gone 15 of 16 innings, and we were going to win that game just because they’d been so good. They’d been able to hold the guys for so many innings in a row. It doesn’t make us put pressure on ourselves as an offense to feel like we have to score right away,” Decker said.
If the performance from Libbert, the Missouri transfer who had fallen from the weekend rotation early in the year, and Robertson, who had given up two hits and two earned runs in two innings against Nebraska, were a bit of a surprise, the Friday night work of Walker Hooks was not.
The former Brandon star arrived in Lincoln with a 2.09 ERA and seven saves in 47 1/3 innings. He was stretched by the demands of extra innings on Friday but was up to the task going 5 1/3 innings with three hits and two earned runs.
Hudson Calhoun, a Tupelo native who played at McCallie School in Chattanooga, Tenn., came behind him to throw 3 2/3 scoreless frames to set the Rebels on the winning path.
“You never know who’s going to pitch or how long they’re going to go. You throw people out there and see if it sticks. We just did a really good job of planning who was going to throw and finishing the weekend out with a good bullpen,” said Hooks, who has been invited to attend USA Baseball’s 2026 Collegiate National Team Training Camp this summer with a chance to make the Collegiate National Team in July.
Once the college baseball season ends, he will join USA Baseball for exhibition games in Burlington, North Carolina and Danville, Virginia at the end of June and the annual Stars vs. Stripes series in Cary, North Carolina from June 30-July 4.
The Collegiate National Team will be announced on July 5 before they go compete in the inaugural World Collegiate Baseball Championship at Taichung City Intercontinental Baseball Stadium in Taichung City, Taiwan, from July 11-15.
Regardless of what players were defined by certain roles, Bianco believed in his bullpen’s depth.
“They obviously were terrific, like they’ve been most of the year,” Bianco said. “Sometimes when you just look at a snapshot, you see some of the warts. We say that a lot about our team. We’re looking at them every single day, but everybody loses, everybody has issues, everybody has some negative things, but our guys have been really good.”
Now the Rebels are in a super regional for the ninth time in Bianco’s 26 years as coach.
Ole Miss advanced to Omaha in 2014 then again with its championship team in 2022. Both times the Rebels won on the road, coming back from a first-game loss to win at Louisiana-Lafayette then sweeping Southern Mississippi.
Ole Miss and Auburn, led by coach Butch Thompson, an Amory native, and former Mississippi State assistant under legendary Ron Polk, did not play in this regular season but did play in Game 1 at the CWS in the Rebels’ championship run.
The Rebels won 5-1 with a dominating performance from right-hander Dylan Delucia, who went 7 2/3 innings with one earned run, 10 strikeouts and no walks.
Kevin Graham doubled and homered for Ole Miss.
This Auburn team lost the opener in its home regional then battled back through the loser’s bracket to defeat Milwaukee twice and take advantage of its national seed with a home super regional.
The Tigers are tied for second in the SEC with a .304 batting average and are second with 132 doubles.
Auburn has a 4.70 team ERA to Ole Miss’ 4.65.
“We have the same process for every game, no matter if it’s Auburn, no matter if it had been Milwaukee,” Bianco said. “We go out and try to win every pitch no matter who we’re playing. If we just stick to our process and what we do, we’ll be alright.”
And Bianco announced Thursday that he will go with Elliott – the only player left from the 2022 national championship roster – in Game 1, pointing that Elliott has the most rest and has been his Friday starter most of the season.
Elliott has a 5-3 record and a 5.21 earned run average, and has struggled over his last five starts, but he is the leader of the pitching staff and has been in these pressure situations before. Ole Miss fans remember Elliott, as a true freshman, struck out 10 without a walk and didn’t allow a run and only three hits in 7 1/3 innings to clinch the super regional series over Southern Miss and send the Rebels to Omaha. And he was the starting pitcher in Game 2 of the CWS championship series against Oklahoma and allowed only six hits and two runs in 6 1/3 innings to keep Ole Miss close before it pulled out a 4-2 victory for its first national championship in school history
