Ole Miss and State

To be fair y’all have an amazing athletic program.

Baseball is the second most popular sport in the state behind football. And Ole Miss and State pour a frick ton of money into their programs and are two of the few who actually turn a pretty nice profit from it. As much as I and other posters have shite on him and wanted him gone, Bianco is arguably the best recruiter and development coach in the nation. His achilles heal until this year was he always made the worst possible coaching decisions in the post season and overthought everything. He was the complete opposite this year.
State has recruited itself since the 80s. That’s why both programs are well oiled machines.

frick Southern Miss and their stank arse JUCO transfer program though. “Elite pitching” my arse

I’m not an expert but I would imagine Texas, Cali, Georgia and Florida have most of the talent. Mississippi and Louisiana have a lot of good players too but not near the volume of those states, just because of population size.

Baseball is a crazy game for sure. LSU and MSU are the blue bloods of the conference but the SEC is simply loaded with solid programs now. I mean everybody is good.

To be honest, I never thought Ole Miss would win one before Arkansas. I mean the hogs have been so close. But in a way, MSU had been so close sooo many times. It's a numbers game I guess, you get close enough times and eventually it falls your way.

By the way, the MSU fans are silly with joy over what happened in the MLB draft. Our recruiting class was ranked #6 and all our class ( except one) either turned down the draft or told MLB that it would take a lot of money not to come to MSU.

LSU has always been able to get recruits to dodge the draft and live a dream coming to campus. This is the first time I know of that MSU recruits turned down more than a million and stuck together as a class because they want to win a title.

By the way, check this guy out. He is a MSU signee pitcher and you rarely ever see what he was born with. LINK

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I follow football recruiting, the top 3 states at producing professional talent seem to be Cali, texas, Florida, you know those states are recruiting hotbeds, what states are the equivalent of that in baseball terms? I’d assume a lot of southern and north eastern states plus California?

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That is true due to their population size, but if you change to per capita look at the number of players in the NFL that grew up in MS.

Give you an idea of the talent my boys played against in 6A football in HS…..

AJ Brown
DK Metcalf
Cam Akers
Darrel Henderson
Gardner Minshew
Rakwoen Davis
Cam Robinson (actually a West Monroe player but our HS used to play them)
Genard Avery

And I am likely forgetting plenty.

Pearl River won the JUCO National Championship and in 2021, Madison Central won the high school national championship with a second team (Jackson Prep) finishing fourth in the final national poll.

Baseball is second to football in popularity, but the gap is much smaller in Mississippi than it is in other states.

This kid right here was the No. 1 player in the nation for Class of 2025. He reclassified to 2024 and he's No. 2. He started the season playing JV for Jackson Prep. He really quickly moved up to varsity, but that's the kind of talent on some of these high school teams.

LINK

Mississippi legalized the lottery a few years back. From what I have heard, a lottery helps fund university baseball teams. Maybe that has something to do with it. Alabama will never have this benefit because our politicians can’t figure out how they can steal from a lottery and get away with it.

Arkansas' state motto is "Thank god for Mississippi".

Lottery money is not used for athletics period.