One Quick Thing: We should have more faith in Clemson Baseball

Clemson Baseball charged out to a great start this season, ascending as high as 2nd in most of the polls. Even college baseball is a long season, however, and the Tigers were not immune to the ups and downs of a typical year.

The bullpen that was once considered the backbone of the pitching staff hit a wall somewhere around mid-April. The season-ending injury to Andrew Ciufo was more impactful than we could have imagined.

After beginning the season 28-3, the Tigers finished 13-11. This late-season swoon has many Tiger fans sweating the upcoming Clemson Regional. It has been a long time since the Tigers have advanced to a Super Regional.

Yet D1Baseball now has Clemson ranked 3rd in the nation following the conference tournaments.

This was shocking to me, but upon reading further, it started to make sense.

The No. 1 team is Tennessee. No surprise there. The Vols are rolling and just won the SEC Tournament with a 5-0 record.

After that, however, you start to see the effects of a long baseball season. No. 2 Kentucky went 1-2 in their tournament. No. 4 Texas A&M and No. 5 Arkansas both had two straight losses in Hoover.

Before you say “Well they’re all in the SEC, somebody had to lose”, only a couple of those losses came to each other or Tennessee. Two of them came to a South Carolina team that Clemson was 2-0 against this season.

The ACC regular-season champion, North Carolina, had an identical record to Clemson in the ACC Tournament at 1-1 and also failed to advance out of pool play. You must go all the way down to No. 12 Duke to find another team that was unblemished this week and won their conference tournament.

Not to mention Clemson was about an arm’s length away from taking the lead in the top of the 9th inning against the Hurricanes.

It is only natural for a fanbase to get excited when their baseball team only experiences three losses through the first seven weeks of a season, but just because the team came back to earth a bit because of injuries and fatigue doesn’t mean that many of the other teams in the nation aren’t experiencing the same challenges.

The people at D1Baseball aren’t dummies. They have a lot of experience and their polls aren't decided by voters who don’t watch the games. The fact that they believe the Tigers are still the 3rd best team in the nation is significant.

It's time we shake off the worries as fans and embrace what this team can achieve this postseason.