What went wrong with Texas A&M baseball: Preseason No. 1 Aggies left out of NCAA Baseball Tournament

Less than a year removed from its first appearance in the College World Series finals, Texas A&M must watch the NCAA Baseball Tournament from home. The Aggies, who entered the 2025 season ranked No. 1 overall, were excluded from the full 64-team field.

In fact, they weren’t even listed among the selection committee’s “First Four Teams Out.” Texas A&M didn’t just miss the cut — it was nowhere near.

The Aggies were the quickest team to ever go from preseason No. 1 to unranked. Now, they’ are also the first preseason No. 1 team to be left out of the tournament since 1991. This from a team that boasted four preseason All-Americans and multiple players that could hear their names called in the early rounds of July’s MLB Draft.

It’s especially crushing since, at one point, this Texas A&M team had some hope. The Aggies shook off a rough start to conference play — they won just one game in their first three series — to take a series against Tennessee in April. The sparked a mini hot streak from April to May, with ensuing series wins against South Carolina, Arkansas and LSU

But an 0-3 series loss to Missouri — a team that hadn’t won a single SEC game before it swept the Aggies — in the second week of May all but sealed Texas A&M’s postseason fate. Even a decent run to the SEC Baseball Tournament quarterfinal round wasn’t enough to salvage a listless season.

So what went wrong for an ostensibly talented team that once boasted so much promise?

Inexperienced coach not enough to right the ship

Texas A&M’s troubles track all the way back to June 25, 2024 when, just one day after the Aggies’ loss to Tennessee in Game 3 of the College World Series finals, former coach Jim Schlossnagle left for Texas. The Aggies quickly turned to hitting coach Michael Earley, who broke into the coaching ranks as an assistant at Arizona State in 2017, to fill the void.

1.  While Schlossnagle’s departure stole all the headlines, especially given the timing and the nature of A&M’s rivalry with Texas, his decision to bring a couple of key assistants with him was equally devastating to the Aggies. Max Weiner, Texas A&M’s pitching coach who had a hand in developing stars like Ryan Prager, and Nolan Cain, who was associate head coach under Schlossnagle at Texas A&M, both left for the same positions in Austin.