Ole Miss Baseball dropped its first game of the 2026 Men’s College World Series to the North Carolina Tar Heels, 6-2, Friday night. Despite the Rebels having the lead in the seventh inning, their bats were near silent and North Carolina tacked on five unanswered runs to come back and complete the victory over Ole Miss.
North Carolina started ace Jason DeCaro, who has 93 strikeouts through 93 ⅔ innings with only 41 walks and seven homers allowed.
“DeCaro, obviously, his numbers are really good, but he locates it very well,” Judd Utermark said in the postgame press conference. “His stuff is great, but that’s not what gets guys in trouble. It’s not the strikeouts, necessarily, even though we had quite a few tonight. It was more of the weak contact that he produces.”
Weak contact was exactly what DeCaro was managing to get from the Rebels for his defense to produce outs. The Tar Heels collected 16 groundouts and fly outs from Rebel batters, accounting for over half of the outs in the game.
While Ole Miss had eight hits, they had a hard time making good contact. Dom Decker was aggressive at the plate, clinching two doubles. Utermark and Owen Paino struck the ball well, but that was all the good contact the Rebels could muster.
Decker’s double in the top of the third scored Brayden Randle, which marked the first run of the game. The Rebels did not score again until the top of the seventh off Utermark’s single to bring in Decker.
On top of the lack of hit production, the Rebels did not draw many walks. The North Carolina pitching staff only gave away three free bases, while striking out 11. Paino, Will Furniss, Tristan Bissetta and Austin Fawley had two strikeouts each.
Ultimately, the Rebels just could not find a way to get on base consistently or land timely hits. They went 2-for-8 with runners in scoring position and 4-for-16 with runners on. Ole Miss had very few opportunities to score due to the lack of runners, and only scored twice with the runners they did have.
“They (North Carolina) got big, timely hits,” head coach Mike Bianco said in the postgame press conference. “I don’t think it was necessarily that we didn’t get runs in. Somebody asked earlier about runs being left on. I mean, heck, I don’t think we had very many opportunities, but the opportunities we did, we seemed to cash in.”
Several Rebel batters worked into deep counts, but it did not fall their way in the end.
“I really did think that a lot of our at-bats were good, even with runners on base, even though we left them stranded,” Utermark said. “We worked counts, but ultimately they played better than us today, and it’s frustrating to have to admit that, but that’s the beauty of Omaha, you get to play another one.”
While the Rebels could not find their offensive groove, the Tar Heels also struggled to get things going at first, but caught fire towards the end of the game and ran away with it. North Carolina strung together consecutive hits and were able to scratch runs across when it mattered most. They scored in the sixth, seventh and eighth innings, and had four two-outs RBIs, while Ole Miss had one.
The Rebels will need to wake up their offense in order to stay alive in the College World Series. They will face Troy on Sunday, June 14 at 1 p.m. in an elimination game. ESPN will broadcast the game.
