College baseball notebook: Schlossnagle sweep against his old team solidifies Texas as nation’s best

Texas got as much and maybe more than it hoped for out of its weekend series against Texas A&M.

The Longhorns won three straight one-run games, extended their win streak to nine games and solidified themselves as the best team in college baseball.

The series was played against the backdrop of Jim Schlossnagle’s first meeting with Texas A&M since he left the Aggies after coaching them to a national runner-up finish last year. Minutes after the College World Series wrapped up, he memorably told the media he planned to finish his career with the Aggies. A day later he was named head coach at Texas.

Fans of the burnt orange thought it was a boss move by athletic director Chris Del Conte. The Aggies’ 12th Man fanbase was livid.

"It means a lot to me that they played well and didn’t get caught up in all the peripheral things about the weekend," Schlossnagle said of his players. “This series isn’t about any coaches or any of that kind of stuff. It's about the players, about the fans, and we had that conversation last week and they did an awesome job."

The wins of 2-1, 3-2 and 6-5 improved the Longhorns to 37-5 and made them the third team to start 19-2 or better in Southeastern Conference play since the league expanded to a 30-game conference schedule in 1996.

Texas increased its lead in the SEC to five games over Arkansas and LSU with three regular-season series left.

Freshman Adrian Rodriguez, who flipped from Texas A&M to Texas when Schlossnagle made his move to Austin, delivered the sweep-clinching home run in the eighth inning Sunday and sixth-year pitcher Andre Duplantier II threw a season-long 5 2/3 innings.

The games drew a Texas three-game series attendance record of 23,680.

Texas remained the consensus No. 1 team in the polls Monday. The Longhorns visit Arkansas this week, host Florida next week and close the regular season at Oklahoma.

LSU (36-9) is No. 2 by D1Baseball.com after taking two of three from defending national champion Tennessee, and Clemson (36-10) is No. 3 after getting swept at North Carolina State.

Baseball America also ranks LSU second followed by North Carolina (33-10), which won two of three at Pittsburgh.

Oregon’s three wins over visiting Oregon State marked the Ducks’ first-ever sweep of a top-three opponent and moved them to Nos. 6 and 12 in the polls.

Oregon (30-12) got home runs from Jacob Walsh in each of the games and Maddox Molony went deep Saturday and Sunday. The Ducks on Tuesday visit Oregon State, which is playing as an independent this season, before resuming Big Ten play at Michigan State.

UC Irvine swept a key road series against Cal Poly to extend its lead in the Big West to four games over the Mustangs with three conference series left. James Castagnola homered twice in a 6-4 win Friday, Trevor Hansen threw 7 2/3 scoreless innings and extended his shutout streak to 21 1/3 in a 4-0 win Saturday, and Rowan Felsch delivered a tie-breaking, two-out single in the ninth in a 10-8 win Sunday.

Big 12-leading West Virginia took three from UCF for its fourth straight sweep. The Mountaineers have won 14 conference games in a row. … Miami has won nine of its last 10 after finishing a sweep of Boston College with a 3-2 win at Fenway Park on Sunday. … UConn has gone from 13-17 to 26-17 while winning 13 straight, the longest active streak in the nation. The Huskies are coming off the first-three game sweep of St. John’s in program history. … Georgia homered seven times in three games against Oklahoma to increase its nation-leading total to 112. Nebraska scored its most runs in a game since 2017 in Sunday’s 21-5 win at Maryland.