Southern Miss baseball gaining traction as potential NCAA regional host site

As a cautionary tale, regional projections don’t guarantee anything. The Southern Miss baseball team knows that better than anyone and yet it’s still hard to ignore the possibility of the NCAA Tournament coming to Hattiesburg.
This week, USM jumped into Baseball America’s latest mock-up of regional host sites, having already been in the like for D1baseball.com.
The Black and Gold were making a strong case for themselves at this same time last year before closing out the regular season with three straight losses at Florida International.
Not even winning the Conference USA Tournament in front of a raucous crowd at Pete Taylor Park was enough to sway the committee, but last weekend’s three game sweep over Florida Atlantic should have a little extra pull in the other direction. Southern Miss third baseman Taylor Braley said, “We know we have a good chance to do something great, and we’ve just got to take it one game at a time and just play our game instead of just getting big-headed and trying to overdo things, do too much. Just staying within our game and having fun.”
Southern Miss first baseman Dylan Burdeaux said, “Everybody continues to talk about 2009 team, the 2009 team. He was like if you don’t believe that it can be the 2017 team you’re kind of crazy, so that’s our motto. We want to make a name for ourselves. We want to make this team want to be remembered.”
If nothing else, Burdeaux’s senior season will be something to remember. He currently leads all of division I with 81 hits, the last one being an 11th inning walk-off against FAU on Sunday.
The Golden Eagles currently have a three game lead in CUSA, as well as an RPI of 16 according to warrennolan.com.
USM returns to action tomorrow at the Pete for game one versus UAB at 6 p.m.
Mississippi State and LSU are also projected as regional host sites in both of the aforementioned publications.