2023 SEC Baseball Tournament Preview: Can Alabama Make A Run?

The Crimson Tide opens play in Hoover on Tuesday against No. 8 seed Kentucky. Can it make a magical run at an SEC title?

Austin Hannon | May 23, 2023

HOOVER, Ala. — Hoover Metropolitan Stadium — the home of SEC baseball.

Yet again, the Hoover Met will play host to the 2023 SEC Baseball Tournament. And yet again, the Alabama Crimson Tide is a part of the 12-team field.

"We're excited to be in Hoover," Jackson said Monday. "This is an awesome event. We look forward to this every single year. The city of Hoover does a great job of putting it on. It's usually a pretty good 'Bama' turnout, so our guys are fired up and looking forward to playing in front of a good crowd tomorrow night."

Jackson has led the Crimson Tide (38-17, 16-14 SEC) on an excellent run to finish the season. Just 19 days ago, former head coach Brad Bohannon was fired for his involvement in suspicious betting against Alabama in its series against then-No. 1 LSU in Baton Rouge.

The Crimson Tide was coming off three losses against the Tigers — and now it had lost its head coach.

Then, Jackson took over the team and everything seemed to change — in more ways than one.

Since the transition to Jackson, Alabama is 8-2 and is looking to do something it hasn't done since 2006 — host a regional in the NCAA tournament. As of Monday afternoon, D1Baseball has the Crimson Tide doing just that — as the No. 14 overall seed in the field.

"I think the guys have done a really good job of being resilient," Jackson said. "Just playing together, staying together — we have an older team and that really helps. But we've played good baseball all year. We got off to a little bit of a slow start in league play in terms of wins but we were in some really good series that kind of could've gone either way and we came up on the bad side of them. We didn't all of the sudden start playing crazy good baseball. We've been playing good baseball all year and we've done a good job the last five or six weeks of starting to put some things together and come out on the good side of some of those close ones."

Postseason baseball may be coming to Sewell-Thomas Stadium. But first, Alabama has an SEC tournament run on its mind.

The Crimson Tide has had success in Hoover in the past. Alabama made a run to the quarterfinals each of the last two seasons.

This Crimson Tide team is better — giving it reason to believe it can make something special happen this week.

It all starts and ends on Tuesday, though. If Alabama can't win its first game, the potential week-long stay would turn into a three-hour visit.

The Crimson Tide opens the tournament as the No. 9 seed and will take on the No. 8-seeded Kentucky Wildcats.

Tuesday's opening round is single-elimination. After that, the bracket moves to double-elimination.

2023 SEC Baseball Tournament Bracket. — 2023 SEC Baseball Tournament Bracket / SEC

So, if Alabama is able to take down the Wildcats (36-17, 16-14 SEC), it will move on to the double-elimination round — if it doesn't, it will head back to Tuscaloosa and cross its fingers for its hosting status.

With a win over the Wildcats, the Crimson Tide would get an amazing prize — No. 1 seed Florida. The Gators (42-13, 20-10 SEC) are playing perhaps the best baseball of any team in the SEC at this moment.

It won't and will never be easy regardless. The SEC tournament brings together the majority of the top programs in the country year in and year out and 2023 is no different. Eight of the 12 teams in Hoover are ranked in the D1Baseball Top-25.

"You've got all the best teams in the country right here in one place," Jackson said. "One of the challenges about this tournament is that you play every day. [...] Day Four, Day Five — everybody's sort of just trying to find anybody that can pitch. You've got to get through it. Luckily, we have some depth on the mound. I think that's one of the biggest challenges — every day you come to the park, you're playing a team that's either top-15 or top-10 in the country."

It all gets started at 9:30 a.m. CT. Alabama and Kentucky will meet at 4:30 p.m. CT on the SEC Network.

LHP Hunter Furtado (5.40 ERA) will get the ball for the Crimson Tide — RHP Darren Williams (3.96 ERA) will be on the mound for the Wildcats.

Let's get this thing going.

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