Nine straight SEC losses. LSU baseball hasn’t won a game in its three most recent series.
The most recent sweep in Starkville was detrimental, to say the least. In those three games, the same pattern was followed. The Tigers were up by multiple runs early, but fell late in the game.
Here are three things that will keep LSU down if they’re not fixed before the next series of conference play.
LSU is the powerhouse, and this team isn’t powerful
The “powerhouse of college baseball” hasn’t been playing like it. LSU is known for being scrappy and pulling things together to win games. There have been fewer than a handful of these games in the 2026 season.
This team has truly had to come together completely to win games, and when they get it together, they truly come together. This has resulted in scores up to 23-7 for victories, but the disconnect has been so strong that when the team is off, there’s no part of the game that’s fighting for victory.
When it clicks, it clicks. When it doesn’t, it really doesn’t.
A team that is known as LSU baseball should be consistently solid every game, and usually, there are only a few games that disprove that fact. However, the 2026 season has consistently been the opposite for the Tigers.
The games have been mostly disastrous until the entire team comes together to absolutely dominate the opponent. This has led to the team collapsing when it faces any sort of pressure or hardship. Entering the next weekend versus South Carolina, the Tigers need to pull it together and reroute the ship.
Play clean ball
The weekend in Starkville proved what the Tiger fans learned two weeks prior in Oxford. The most consistent part of the team falls apart when everything else goes right. In all three games versus Mississippi State, the purple and gold pitching was doing enough to get by, and the offense showed up enough to put up a comfortable lead.
But the defense was screwing up left and right, and not even just by listed errors in the scorebooks. The Tigers had another scenario where they could have gotten out of the inning and won the game, but the middle infielders missed second base.
Small, careless errors that don’t technically get ruled errors in the scorebook are killing this team. Being able to get out of innings when things are rough has been the defensive strong suit at times throughout the season, and this is the second time it has come back to bite LSU.
It’s the same thing that put LSU in extra innings versus Tennessee during Easter weekend. If the team gets out of the inning by playing routine defense, then the game ends in nine innings, not 12.
The team needs to clean up this aspect of the game if the Tigers look to scrape through the tough games to come.
Finishing games is key
This team has done it all to get ahead early and often. All three games in Starkville saw at least a three-run lead in the middle innings, but each game also resulted in a late, heartbreaking loss.
The next step in each of these games is to stay strong until the finish. The energy shifts noticeably when the late innings arrive, and it’s like the team hits a wall.
Finishing a game in the SEC is the hardest thing to do because every team is solid, and LSU has struggled to do that this season. Late inning rallies spark for the opposing team, and the flame LSU once had squibbers out.
The only team that has struggled more than LSU has this season is Vanderbilt, and the Tigers even fell to two heartbreaking losses in the late innings of that series as well. The Bayou Bengals need to try to even out the run-scoring efforts throughout the game or continue to dominate on the back half.
The next two weekends of SEC play are easily two of the most difficult. The Tigers need to pull it together to try to raise a postseason resume.
And it all starts with these three things.
