The emails and texts from folks perplexed about the odd 2025 UVA Baseball season started early.
The general theme: why is it that this team, preseason #2 nationally, best roster, on paper, that we’ve seen maybe ever, can’t seem to get out of its own way?
The search for an answer takes us back into the winter months, when it started to leak out from behind the scenes that Brian O’Connor was telling anybody who would listen that he was concerned about funding for his program going forward.
ICYMI
- Brian O’Connor texted his team to tell them he’s headed to Mississippi State
- Reality check: Brian O’Connor doesn’t need those 34 scholarships he’s been promised
My AFP colleague, Scott German, kept telling me that the word was, O’Connor was harping on needing to get a commitment from the AD, Carla Williams, to give him more money for scholarships and NIL, and that he was complaining that he’d been told the bulk of the money to be allocated under the still-to-be-signed House settlement was going to football and men’s basketball, the two sports on Grounds that turn a profit.
Scott’s concern, as it was with Tony Bennett – Scott has good instincts – was that it sounded to him like we were on the verge of losing O’Connor.
I did what Chris Graham does, researched the numbers, saw that UVA Athletics has the second-biggest baseball budget in the ACC, is Top 15 nationally, and said, meh.
At worst, to me, what O’Connor was said to be doing behind the scenes – we now know, of course, that this was, indeed, going on – was playing office politics, advocating for his program to get more from the budget, which I’d expect any good manager type to do.
I didn’t expect that he would get himself into such a lather that he would talk himself into leaving for a job at a school that spends the same amount of money on baseball, is otherwise dead last in the SEC in overall athletics spending, with an AD who is on the hot seat because the football program is in utter shambles.
Is the lather that O’Connor worked himself into the answer for why his preseason #2 team started 12-11 and ended up not even getting an NCAA Tournament berth?
***
It started early, with an Opening Day loss to Michigan in Puerto Rico, then losses in two of three the second weekend in Texas.
I was at The Dish for the home opener with VMI, on an unseasonably warm February afternoon, and something felt off.
Virginia won, 6-4, but the Keydets, which went on to a 27-26 finish, playing in the SoCon, hung around all day.
First ACC weekend, at home, Boston College took two of three, and the UVA win was perhaps the ugliest in program history, a 22-16 abomination.
But that wasn’t the nadir, which would come in a five-game mid-March losing streak that started with a loss to Richmond, after which Brian O’Connor admitted: “We weren’t ready to play from the first pitch.”
“It’s not about winning and losing the ball game. It’s about being ready to play from pitch one, and we are not doing that, OK. And that’s on me, OK,” O’Connor said. “They’re 18- to 24-year-old kids, OK. I’m the grown man that’s been here for 20 years, and I freaking own it, OK.”
Duke came to town two days later, and left with a three-game sweep – winning 9-5, 13-2 and 13-6 – ahead of a 5-3 loss at Liberty the following Tuesday.
Those five losses in seven days, beginning with an L that O’Connor said his team wasn’t prepared to play, would be what kept the preseason #2 out of the NCAA Tournament.
***
Virginia finished the regular season with a 20-6 run that, I thought, should have punched an NCAA ticket.
At least one win in the ACC Tournament in Durham would certainly have put the icing on the cake.
Once again, O’Connor’s team wasn’t ready to play.
Boston College, the sub-.500 team that had taken two of three at The Dish back in early March, scored five in the top of the first, aided by plain awful defense – two errors, a grounder ruled an infield single that should have been an error, a wild pitch, four stolen bases.
After an Eric Becker two-run homer in the bottom half seemed to stanch the bleeding, O’Connor panicked.
His ace, Jay Woolfolk, gave up a leadoff single to Sam McNulty, struck out Josiah Ragsdale, then hit Patrick Roche with a 3-2 fastball.
Forty-three pitches in, with the big issue being the awful defense behind him, O’Connor went to the bullpen.
It didn’t work. A double-steal, a walk and a wild pitch from reliever Bryson Moore put two more runs on the board, and the rout was on.
***
O’Connor emerged as a candidate for the Mississippi State job, in the media, anyway, not long after the AD there, Zac Selmon, fired the guy who’d won the 2021 national title at the school, Chris Lemonis, in late April.
Asked about the rumors, O’Connor had this to say in a press avail on May 8, a week later:
“It’s nothing I have any control over, but it’s an honor that people think that much about what has been done in this baseball program and that’s all it is. It’s all a result of the consistent success we’ve had in this baseball program,” O’Connor told reporters in advance of a key weekend series with Miami.
“If it’s about developing players and getting to Omaha, why is there another job that’s any better? Because that’s all we care about. We care about developing the players, winning and running an elite program that they enjoy being part of and that will set them up for success in the rest of their lives,” O’Connor said.
I’m working the public-records angle with Mississippi State University to develop a timeline on when the school reached out to O’Connor, and how things advanced to him putting pen to paper.
I did stumble onto, perhaps, something.
I found the aircraft registration for the MSU Athletics LearJet, and probably like others who also found that, ran into a problem, in that the flight history of the aircraft is “not available for tracking per request from the owner/operator,” per the popular tracking website FlightAware.
But I also stumbled upon another flight tracker, Globe.Adsbexchange.com, that maintains a history of flights, though not what you’d call in an easily digestible manner.
Basically, you can hit the previous button on the date bar in the dropdown and see where a particular plane, by call number, has been.
So, I did this, repeatedly, seeing the MSU LearJet make a run of one-off short flights in the Mid-South and back and forth to Texas, until I got back to April 30.
On April 30, the jet made a flight from Mississippi to Richmond, landing at Richmond International Airport at 11:46 a.m. Eastern, with the tracker indicating that it departed at 2:25 p.m.
Did something happen in that two hours and 39 minutes involving some sort of in-person meeting between Zac Selmon and Brian O’Connor?
The timing of the flight, two days after Selmon fired Chris Lemonis, and just as the UVA Baseball team was about to start its seven-day final exam break, could be coincidental.
The meeting window on that day would have been tight – UVA Baseball had a game at The Dish that day that started at 3:04 p.m.
I tracked the MSU Learjet from April 30 forward, and the only other time it was on the East Coast was last night, when it flew to CHO to pick up O’Connor, and returned to Starkville around 10 p.m. local time.
It wouldn’t be unusual for an AD and a top coaching target to want to meet face-to-face as opposed to talking on the phone or over Zoom – in fact, it would be more unusual for a transaction of this nature, involving a job paying seven figures to a guy tasked with managing a budget in the high seven figures, for it to be done without some flesh being pressed.
It feels like there’s something here, doesn’t it?
The rumors about Mississippi State’s interest in O’Connor started floating into the media the day before the flight to Richmond, with D1Baseball.com’s Kendall Rogers the first to get the story out.
***
We give outsized attention to the seven College World Series appearances and the 2015 national title, because obviously, right?
What about the three seasons after the national title that ended with his team left out of the NCAA Tournament?
After getting bounced out of the 2016 and 2017 tournaments in the Regionals, his 2018 and 2019 teams were left out of the field.
COVID ended the 2021 season early, and then we got to 2021, which had the ‘Hoos at 22-21 on May 4 after a home loss to VCU, before a 7-2 finish landed Virginia the #3 seed in the Columbia Regional, the beginning of an improbable run to Omaha.
Back-to-back Series trips in 2023 and 2024 ended with a thud, with UVA going two-and-out both times with teams that went 50-15 and 46-17, respectively.
The sum of the nine full seasons post-2015 is: three World Series trips, and a 1-6 record in Omaha, three years bounced out in the Regionals, and three years not getting into the tournament, with one of the World Series years thisclose to being an outside-looking-in year.
UVA fans upset over O’Connor’s shocking departure are playing the blame game with various blindfolds – taking target at Carla Williams, because the AD is an easy target, the donors, because of course the moneybags are just sitting around with nothing better to do with their money than fund random people’s favorite sportsball teams.
My read here is, this is all on O’Connor. I think he talked himself into thinking that the changing athletics landscape in this still-unsettled NIL/transfer portal/House settlement era was going to pass him by, and for some reason, he needed to act now, as opposed to waiting it out a year or two for whatever the new rules of game are going to be to emerge.
It makes no sense that he turned down Texas in 2014, turned down LSU in 2021, and took a call and had a meeting with the people at Mississippi State, the curly hair on a mole on the sphincter of the SEC, dead last in athletics spending, much less that he took the job.
O’Connor talked himself into panicking, basically.
At 54, he’s at the stage in life where you start thinking about how the last several years of the productive part are going to play out.
I feel bad, in one sense, that it played out this way for O’Connor, because in the last 24 hours, or probably more to the reality, dating back to a meeting on April 30, he has trashed his legacy, forever.
From going through the motions from the exam break on, to texting his guys on his way to the airport, yeah, we can put the kibosh on the RFPs for the statue we were going to locate out in front of The Dish.
This guy who told people for 22 years that he was about winning the right way, with student-athletes who wanted to develop as baseball players while also getting a great education, and then left for a 200-plus-ranked national university, he was clearly just telling us gullible UVA folks what he thought we wanted to hear.
I’ll give him credit; it worked, until it didn’t.
That sentence is the 2025 UVA Baseball season in a nutshell.
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Chris Graham
