The Road to Omaha now has its road map, and we should hear no complaints from Hattiesburg, Starkville or Oxford. As per usual, Mississippi will be well represented in the NCAA Baseball Tournament.

Ole Miss and Southern Miss will both host NCAA Regionals and Mississippi State, after a season in which it fired the head coach, is in the tournament as a 3-seed at Florida State. You won’t see that happen often.

First things first: Ole Miss, the No. 10 national seed, will play Murray State Friday night at 7 p.m. Southern Miss, the 16-seed, will play Columbia University Friday night at 6 p.m. State plays Northeastern, which has won 26 straight games, Friday night at 6:30 at Tallahassee.

In the other half of the Oxford regional, Georgia Tech plays Western Kentucky. In the other first round game at Hattiesburg, Alabama plays Miami. At Tallahassee, host Florida State will play Bethune-Cookman.

You ask me, both Southern Miss coach Christian Ostrander and Ole Miss coach Mike Bianco have big decisions to make. Both teams have established pitching aces in USM’s JB Middleton and the Rebels’ Hunter Elliott. Do you start your ace against the weaker 4-seed, or do you save him to pitch against a decidedly more formidable opponent on Saturday? Clearly, State interim head coach Justin Parker doesn’t face the same quandary. You go with your best when facing a higher seed with a 26-game win streak – no matter what league they play in.

The old school approach is that the next game is the most important game. In other words, throw you ace. Keep in mind also, you need for your game one starter to go as deep as possible into the game, saving your bullpen arms for a long weekend. The flip side: Having your best pitcher available to start the second game gives you a decided edge going against your opponent’s No. 2 pitcher.

Bianco’s decision is complicated by the fact that Murray State, the Missouri Valley Conference regular season and tournament champions, is one of the nation’s best No. 4 seeds. The Racers have won 39 games and seven for their last eight. In mid-week regular season games, the Racers lost 8-7 in 10 innings at Ole Miss and won at Kentucky 5-4. Using golf terminology, Murray is no gimme. The Racers hit .301 as a team. Still, I’d lean toward holding Elliott for either ACC regular season champ Georgia Tech or Western Kentucky.

At USM, Ostrander must strongly consider holding Middleton, the recent Ferriss Trophy winner and likely All-American and high MLB draft choice. Columbia, the Ivy League regular season and tournament champ, hits at a .290 clip but, at least on paper, has pitching issues. The Lions’ team earned run average is 6.57 and opponents are hitting .290 against them. Me? I’d take my chances with Matt Adams, who has been really good of late, against Columbia, and then have Middleton, he of the 10-1 record and .168 opponents’ batting average, to go against Alabama or Miami. Southern Miss has won all six of Adams’ most recent starts, and he threw seven innings of four-hit, shutout baseball against Old Dominion in the Sun Belt Conference Tournament.

More college baseball observations:

• The SEC placed a record 13 teams in the tournament, which represents roughly 20 percent of the field. The only SEC selection I’d quibble with: Kentucky, at 29-24 and losing its last four and seven of its last 10 games.

• Color me surprised the Troy Trojans were left out of the 64-team field. Troy finished 39-21 and was nationally ranked for much of the season. Troy was the nation’s only team that hadn’t lost a weekend series until being swept in the last series of the regular season by Southern Miss. The Trojans did lose six of their last eight, and it now seems certain that the 2-1 loss to USM in the Sun Belt semifinals probably kept them out. 

• Ole Miss, picked to finish 15th in the SEC, is instead the 10th national seed. Mike Bianco deserves strong consideration for any Coach of the Year honor out there.

• Looking ahead: The Oxford Regional is matched with the Athens Regional, meaning if the No. 1 seeds advance, Ole Miss would play a Super Regional at Georgia, a team the Rebels did not play in 2025. The Hattiesburg Regional is matched with the Nashville Regional, which means Southern Miss, the No. 16 national seed, would play overall 1-seed Vandy if both teams advance. The Tallahassee Regional is matched against the Corvallis Regional, which means State would likely head far to the west if the Bulldogs can advance.

• Southern Miss has now achieved nine consecutive 40-win seasons. No other Division I baseball team in the country has done that. This will be the Golden Eagles’ ninth consecutive NCAA Tournament appearance (not counting the 2020 season curtailed by Covid).