By Parrish Alford
Most young athletic administrators know their bread is buttered with the football program.
Football is no less important at Mississippi State, but Zac Selmon, in the summer of 2025, knew he had to spread the butter for baseball too.
The facilities, the atmosphere, the history – they all rang like cowbells in his ears when he hung a help wanted sign on his head coach’s office almost a year ago.
It’s no easy thing to fire a national championship coach, which is what Selmon, 41, did when he parted ways with Chris Lemonis.
Lemonis wasn’t fired for a single issue — he was dismissed because of a multi-year slide following a national championship, capped by a disappointing 2025 season that made missing the postseason likely.
After winning the championship in 2021, the Bulldogs missed the NCAA Tournament in 2022 and 2023. They played in an NCAA regional in 2024 but were on track to miss the field again with a 7-14 SEC mark at the time of his firing.
At a program with Omaha expectations, that downturn ultimately led to a rare in-season change.
The termination of Lemonis awakened the echoes.
In rebuilding a championship program, Selmon needed a championship coach. Those echoes helped him lure Brian O’Connor from Virginia.
“The atmosphere at Dudy Noble Field is nationally recognized as the best in the sport,” O’Connor said at the time of his hiring. “I’m incredibly honored and grateful for the opportunity to lead a program with this kind of legacy and fan base. Mississippi State has set the standard in college baseball and I can’t wait to get to work, build relationships and compete for championships in Starkville.”
O’Connor built the Cavaliers into a national program.
The Bulldogs (26-10, 7-8 SEC), have been ranked in D1Baseball’s Top 10 all year, are on a nine-game winning streak. MSU – ranked No. 10 by DI Baseball and has the 10th best RPI – has a huge SEC series this weekend with No. 4 Texas in Austin. The first game of the series is Friday at 6:30 p.m. on SEC Network plus. MSU is 35-10 overall and 13-8 in the SEC, in fourth place, a half game behind Texas.
The Bulldogs are one of the hottest teams in the country, and haven’t lost since a 7-2 decision to Tennessee on April 12. MSU has two consecutive sweeps of South Carolina and LSU and won its ninth straight with a 7-3 win over Ole Miss in the Governor’s Cup at Trustmark Park in Pearl.
Prior to Starkville, O’Connor was named National Coach of the Year three times. In 22 seasons at Virginia, he guided the Cavs to 14 straight NCAA tournaments from 2004-2017, 18 overall trips to the NCAAs, seven College World Series appearances, including three of the last four years. UVA won the national title in 2015 and was runner-up in 2014 when it eliminated Ole Miss in the Omaha semifinals.
His reputation allowed him to quickly compile an enviable rosters, one with five Virginia transfers, that attracted a healthy share of preseason attention.
But championships aren’t cheap as the Bulldogs are finding.
It’s nothing veteran coaches haven’t seen. O’Connor presents himself as unflappable on social media clips and in television interviews, exuding confidence in players and a belief that State will navigate choppy seas.
“The message has been to stay the course,” said Mississippi State associate head coach Kevin McMullan, who followed O’Connor to Starkville after spending 21 years with him in Charlottesville. “We have an excellent club. You win one day at a time, and those games are behind us. You look forward to the next challenge, and you have to be prepared for whatever it might give you.”
O’Connor certainly knows the way to Omaha.
It’s his hometown, and he stayed there for college baseball as a pitcher for Creighton in the early 1990s.
He started his coaching career there then spent eight years at Notre Dame where he was part of Paul Mainieri’s staff to pushed the Bulldogs to the limit in the Starkville Regional in 2000. He went from Notre Dame to Virginia.
It became clear that O’Connor was a communicator, not a yeller and screamer.
“There is no one way for a good leader to motivate every player,” said Charleston Southern coach Karl Kuhn, who O’Connor’s Virginia pitching coach for 16 years. “You have to get the player or person to trust that you care about them as an individual and that they’re not just the means of your business. He does that. He makes them feel they can trust him, that he truly cares about them. He gets to know them.”
All players are different. Some respond to hard truth about their performance – “pushed in the tail” Kuhn describes – while others need to be encouraged in a kinder, gentler manner.
“He can do both,” Kuhn said.
O’Connor, whether with players or his assistant coaches, strikes the rare balance of keeping a finger in every aspect of his program while also not making it feel like he’s micro-managing anything.
“You hire good people and trust them,” Kuhn said. “If you hire the right person, that person is motivated because he doesn’t want to let the leader down because the leader trusts him.”
“He’s truthful with our guys, and players respect that,” McMullan said. “They may not like it in the moment, but at the end of the day, if you’re truthful, with clarity, they respect that, and they’ll play their tails off for you.”
O’Connor is a relationships person not only with his players.
“He can have a conversation with the president of a company or a guy in a deer stand,” Kuhn said. “It’s a very rare trait. When you have someone who is real, who is genuine and honest, people are attracted to those qualities.”
On the field, motivation is only part of the equation.
After players buy in you have to direct and develop.
O’Connor has had 102 Major League Draft selections — including 14 first-round selections — and 31 players reach the Major Leagues, including Ryan Zimmerman, Sean Doolittle and Chris Taylor, along with Andrew Abbott.
Zimmerman, a corner infielder, played 16 MLB seasons, all with Washington. Doolittle, a relief pitcher, was a Nationals teammate on the 2019 World Series-winning team. Both were two-time all-stars. Abbott, a rookie in 2023, has started seven games for Reds this season. Taylor played 12 years mostly with the Dodgers.
There was buzz around O’Connor’s name as soon as the Mississippi State job became open.
Eventually T’s were crossed, I’s dotted, and O’Connor was introduced in a night-time spectacle at Dudy Noble Field.
“He’s trustworthy, and he’s got a history of developing players not just as players but as young men. Who wouldn’t want to send your kid to someone with those qualities?” McMullan asked. “That’s what you hope for as a dad.”
