STARKVILLE – Mississippi State head coach Brian O’Connor’s first task when he arrived in Starkville in June was to meet with the returning players from a disappointed and frustrated baseball team. In the span of just three months, the Bulldogs had gone through a roller coaster SEC campaign, gone through a midseason head coaching change and played through a heartbreaking Tallahassee Regional while O’Connor’s signing was being finalized and tracked on social media.
It was an understandably difficult situation for the team, but it was important for O’Connor to meet with each player who had eligibility remaining. In the end, 15 stayed, but from all of them, the new head coach learned as much as he could about what exactly playing for the Bulldogs means to players.
“One of the things that the first team meeting we had, I had all the players get up individually and introduce themselves to their teammates,” he said. “Where they were from, the position they play. The returning MSU players, I had each of them speak to what the M over S means to them. I can tell you, being in this room and hearing those 15 young men talk about what it means to them was incredibly powerful.”
The new head coach arrived with a winning resume. Multiple trips to Omaha and a national championship in 2015 speak to the caliber of program that he built at Virginia, and the quality of players who followed him to Starkville through the transfer portal. It might have been easy to assume those players would take a leading role in setting the standard in the new team, but that isn’t the way O’Connor wanted things done.
“Certainly, there are a few players that have previously played for me, who came here from Virginia,” O’Connor said of the group’s dynamic, “but I’ve made a full conscious effort to having them not lead things, just instill what I believe in how a college baseball program needs to be run and how they need to go about their business. I got to tell you, in the first four weeks together, it’s been impressive.”
Through early workouts, positional work, and now intrasquad scrimmages, the team has come together in a way that O’Connor hoped it would be: by having fun.
The Bulldogs will play two exhibition games and 15 fall scrimmages, separated into three-game series formats. Every three games, the teams switch up again, and a point system will chart the players throughout the fall to reward the top 50% with steaks and the bottom 50% with hot dogs at an end-of-semester dinner.
The Diamond Dawgs will play intrasquad scrimmages at Dudy Noble Field today at 6 p.m. and tomorrow at 5 p.m.
O’Connor picks two captains to assemble the teams each time, one fielder and one pitcher, and also gives them in-game decisions to make as a de facto player-coach in the scrimmages.
There is competition there, but the method encourages camaraderie, and he is already seeing the results.
“When you have 15 returning players, 18 transfers, and eight freshmen to see them very quickly in the clubhouse connect with each other, encourage each other, push each other, has been a bright spot for me in these first four weeks. To see them come together, working together for a common goal.”
O’Connor has learned more about the M over S as well, not just from his players but from hitting the recruiting trail. MSU completed the second-ranked transfer portal class in the country over the summer and has carried that momentum into high school recruiting. On Tuesday, the program landed commitments from three of the top recruits from the 2026 and 2027 high school classes.
In that regard, O’Connor is discovering how to shape the program in his vision after just four months on the job, but he has also discovered a weight to the shirt and the culture that resonates across the sport in the same way it did with him when he answered athletic director Zac Selmon’s phone call last spring.
“It’s more than the stadium and fans, that’s the best in America, we all know that,” he said. “It goes back to people and the pride that not just the players that have worn this uniform, but the fans have in this baseball program. You feel it and sense it every day. And when you talk to recruits out there, some of them you’re trying to educate them about that, but some of them have grown up knowing what this baseball program, this culture is about. It’s incredibly powerful, really is.”
Posted in College Sports
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