The Nebraska Cornhuskers baseball team not only lost 20-5 to Maryland on Sunday but now looks in danger of missing the postseason entirely.
It’s hard to say that the Nebraska baseball season is in actual shambles, considering the team’s record is still 25-19-1 but … the Nebraska baseball season is in shambles. After a start to the season that included a sweep of Northwestern, far more has gone wrong than has gone right.
What has gone wrong was accentuated on Sunday as a Nebraska Cornhuskers pitching staff that has struggled throughout the season, absolutely fell apart. It fell apart to the tune of 20 runs allowed. They allowed those 20 runs in six innings. They allowed eight runs in each of the 4th and 6th innings.
After that aforementioned sweep of Northwestern, the Huskers were in first place. They are nowhere near first place now.
The #Huskers are now percentage points ahead of Illinois for 9th place in the Big Ten. The top 8 teams make the conference tournament. Will Bolt's squad in real danger of missing the conference tourney for the second straight year. pic.twitter.com/VHBqVyNizU
— Husker Corner (@theHuskerCorner) May 7, 2023
They are in fact, in danger of falling into 9th place. And with six games to go in the conference slate, that means they are in danger of missing the postseason altogether.
That can be a hard thing for Nebraska Cornhuskers fans to grasp because baseball is the only major men’s sport where that’s even a concern. No matter how bad Fred Hoiberg’s teams have been, they’ve still made the conference tournament.
There was still an outside chance they might make some noise in the postseason.
Nebraska Cornhuskers baseball on the cusp of big failure
Should the Huskers fail to make the Big Ten tournament, it will be the first time that’s happened in consecutive seasons since Mike Anderson’s Nebraska baseball squad missed it three straight years from 2009 to 2011. Anderson was fired after the 2011 campaign.
Of course, Anderson also had quite a bit more success with Nebraska than Will Bolt has had before the program bottomed out under his stewardship. Darin Erstad, who has never really been considered a successful coach for the Huskers, had inarguably more success than Bolt has seen so far.
Erstad didn’t miss a B1G tourney until his seventh season. Bolt could do it in his second and third full seasons (2020 doesn’t count.)
The oddity of Big Ten baseball in general, is that it feels like if the Huskers could find a way to get hot. They could win the whole thing if they can make the B1G tourney.
Granted, their pitching will need to find a way to get it together to do that.
If it can’t, then Nebraska Cornhuskers fans should really start wondering whether Will Bolt needs to be on the hot seat. And how hot that seat needs to be.