Put respect on Tennessee baseball's name. Vols are a deserving national champion | Estes
OMAHA, Neb. — Put respect on the name. Old labels have expired.
There’s a new one to attach to Tennessee baseball:
National champion.
Coach Tony Vitello’s upstart bad boys have become college baseball’s best. The culmination of the journey was Monday night, as the Vols secured their first College World Series title — and the school’s first national team title of any kind in 15 years — with a 6-5 victory over Texas A&M.
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They are deserving champs. Favorites for the entire NCAA tournament, this is a team that came through and will rank as an all-timer in the sport. Tennessee won 60 games, won the SEC regular season and tournament and entered the NCAA tournament as the nation’s No. 1 overall seed, which carried a weird stigma in a sport in which the No. 1 seed hadn’t won it all in 25 years.
Now it has.
Tennessee also had struggled in previous trips to Omaha under Vitello.
Not this one.
The final game of the 2024 College World Series will live forever in the minds of Tennessee fans, whether they were sweating it out at Charles Schwab Field or not. And plenty were. The thousands in attendance included Vols great Peyton Manning, country music’s Morgan Wallen, football coach Josh Heupel and men’s basketball coach Rick Barnes.
They chanted “It’s great to be a Tennessee Vol” and sang along to "Rocky Top" as the Vols broke open the game with a three-run seventh inning that foretold the Big Orange delirium to follow.
The celebration was only just beginning.
Here are a few quick takeaways from Game 3:
How about Zander Sechrist?
What a story Zander Sechrist has been these past six weeks. Can’t overstate how much the senior pitcher has meant to the Vols’ historic run, right down to the end.
Sechrist was magnificent in Monday’s pressure-packed Game 3, changing speeds, hitting his spots and keeping the Aggies consistently off balance. He struck out seven, walked one and allowed only one run in 5⅓ innings, continuing the remarkable story of a mid-week pitcher who consistently thrived as one of Tennessee’s key players in big moments.
In his past three starts, Sechrist didn’t allow an earned run in 6⅓ innings against Evansville in the deciding game of a NCAA Super Regional and then shut down two of the nation’s best lineups in Florida State and Texas A&M at the CWS.
On Monday, Nate Snead inherited Sechrist’s two runners in the sixth inning and pitched out of it with the Vols’ 3-1 lead intact, with the final out a bullet off the bat of A&M’s Caden Sorrell that happened to sail directly into Blake Burke’s glove.
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And then there’s Kirby Connell
Texas A&M was making it interesting in the eighth inning, and Vitello turned to who he seemed to always turn to when things get tricky: Veteran reliever Kirby Connell.
With two runners on base as the Vols’ five-run lead had been cut to 6-3, Connell fired consecutive strikeouts of Kaeden Kent and Ryan Targac to end the threat.
Consider Connell’s legendary status further solidified in Knoxville.
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It was still about the long ball
Game 3, like Game 2 of this CWS final, was an intense, tight contest more than some free-swinging shootout. Everything mattered. But as usual, home runs made the difference for Tennessee.
Christian Moore set the tone with a solo shot in the Vols’ first at-bat, and Dylan Dreiling added his third homer in as many days in the seventh inning.
For all this Tennessee team will be remembered for having, its power hitting still stands out. And it wasn’t just a product of playing in tiny Lindsey Nelson Stadium. That power held up in Omaha. The lesson for other teams from this CWS: Go put together a lineup with five hitters who’ve slugged at least 20 home runs.
A sweltering finale
If you can’t stand the heat, you probably shouldn’t have been near Omaha on Monday.
The area was under an excessive heat warning for the start of Game 3, with record-high temperatures and heat indexes approaching 110 degrees. Felt every bit of that, too, in the late afternoon as the teams were taking pregame batting practice.
Reach Tennessean sports columnist Gentry Estes at gestes@tennessean.com and on the X platform (formerly known as Twitter) @Gentry_Estes.
This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Tennessee baseball earned its respect with 2024 CWS national title
