Teel: Virginia and its ACC rivals took divergent paths to super regionals (2024)

Virginia defied the numbers, while North Carolina reveled in drama. Clemson ended a torturous drought, Florida State pulled a 180, and N.C. State continued a year-long heater.

Such were the wildly divergent paths five ACC teams took in compiling a 15-1 combined record en route to this weekend’s NCAA super regionals, baseball’s version of the Sweet 16.

Multiple teams from the conference have reached the College World Series in 11 of the past 17 tournaments, a span in which 31 ACC clubs have earned the coveted trip to Omaha, Nebraska. And with all except N.C. State playing at home this weekend, anything less than two CWS qualifiers this year would feel like underachieving.

The same can be said of the sport’s other heavyweight conference, the SEC. Tennessee, Kentucky, Texas A&M, Georgia and Florida will represent the league in the best-of-3 super regionals, with all except the Gators hosting.

Indeed, an ACC and/or SEC team is competing in each of the eight super regionals, a remarkable confluence that could find the two leagues comprising the entire CWS field later this month.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. How the five ACC squads won regional championships, equaling the conference record established in 2013, is a story unto itself.

Quality starts

We start, naturally, in Charlottesville, where venerable coach Brian O’Connor has UVa among the last 16 teams standing for the ninth time in the last 15 years.

Paced by Harrison Didawick’s 23 home runs — his next will break Jake Gelof’s single-season program standard, set just last season — the Cavaliers have bludgeoned opponents for much of the year. And given their erratic pitching, that offense has been essential.

So what happened last weekend in the regional? Virginia hit only one home run in three games, a second-inning shot by Henry Godbout vs. Penn, while the starting rotation turned into the 2019 Washington Nationals.

The Cavaliers define a quality start as at least six innings with no more than three earned runs allowed, and during the regular season they authored six such outings. Had Joe Savino recorded one more out against Penn, they would have had three in as many days.

Savino, Evan Blanco and Jay Woolfolk (Benedictine), the latter two vs. Mississippi State, combined to pitch 19⅔ innings, yielding seven earned runs while striking out 22 and walking two.

Virginia welcomes Kansas State this weekend, and while the Wildcats, steered by former Virginia Tech coach Pete Hughes, have never reached Omaha, they’ll arrive after scoring 33 runs in three regional victories. Most impressive, they roughed up Arkansas’ Hagen Smith, rated by MLB.com the top available left-handed pitcher in next month’s major-league draft, for six earned runs in five innings.

UVa came from behind in both wins over Mississippi State, but the tension paled to what unfolded at North Carolina.

The tournament’s No. 4 overall seed, UNC was on the brink of losing its regional opener to Long Island, a setback that would have required the Tar Heels to win four consecutive games to survive. But freshman Gavin Gallaher’s walk-off grand slam gave them an 11-8 victory, after which they took two of three against defending national champion LSU.

Down 3-2 entering the ninth inning of the decisive contest, North Carolina forced extra innings on Colby Wilkerson’s RBI single and scored the winning run a frame later on Alex Madera’s base hit. With more than 960,000 viewers on ESPN2, the game was most-watched regional clash on record, according to ESPN.

Similar to Virginia, UNC faces a Big 12 opponent hunting its first trip to the College World Series, West Virginia. Thanks to bracket fortune, the Mountaineers swept their regional without facing host Arizona, defeating Dallas Baptist and Grand Canyon (twice).

ACC vs. SEC

In contrast to UNC and Virginia, N.C. State never trailed in beating Bryant, South Carolina and James Madison to become the first ACC school to reach a baseball super regional and both basketball Final Fours in the same year.

Moreover, N.C. State, North Carolina and Clemson are among the four Bowl Subdivision schools in 2023-24 to make the final 16 in the baseball and men’s basketball tournaments while also winning at least eight football games — Tennessee is the other.

The Wolfpack travel to Georgia for one of two ACC-SEC super regionals and where the Bulldogs are a scalding 32-5 this season. Yikes.

Florida at Clemson is the weekend’s other ACC-SEC matchup, the Tigers’ first super regional since 2010, a painful gap for a program rich in baseball heritage (12 CWS appearances). Five times in that span Clemson failed to advance out of a home regional, but in their own park last week, second-year coach Erik Bakich’s Tigers beat High Point and Coastal Carolina, the latter twice.

Florida State coach Link Jarrett also is in his second season, and what a ride he’s experienced.

In 2022 he guided Notre Dame to an improbable CWS, success that landed him the job at his alma mater, where he played shortstop during the early 1990s and advanced to Omaha three times. But his maiden year leading the Seminoles was historically poor as the program endured its first losing season ever, ending a streak of 44 consecutive NCAA tournament appearances.

FSU wasn’t away long. The Seminoles and ACC player of the year James Tibbs III opened this season with a 19-game winning streak and defeated Stetson and Central Florida (twice) in the regional.

Florida State, 30-4 at home, hosts Connecticut this weekend, and unless Danny Hurley’s recent postseason magic rubs off on the Huskies, the Seminoles rate as favorites.

At least one ACC team has reached Omaha in each of the past 17 tournaments, and eight of the conference’s 14 programs have advanced there in the past decade. Yet the league’s only national championships are Virginia in 2015 and Wake Forest in 1955.

So the perennial question endures: Can the ACC, in baseball parlance, close?