The game scheduled to Tuesday night against Texas State was rained out and will not be rescheduled. So ends the home season of the 2015 Texas Longhorns baseball squad, which looked like a potential Omaha contender to several neutral observers, and not just these burnt orange-tinged eyes as little as two months ago. Then the wheels came off, as Texas--which started the conference season at 5-1--plummeted to a 9-12 conference mark and is only 24-24 overall.
Although the final nail in Texas' hopes of an at-large postseason berth was the series loss at home last weekend to Texas Tech, in reality such a bid was exceedingly unlikely for the last several weeks. With the Tuesday rainout, the Longhorns are in the midst of a 13-day period without a single game as they have this weekend off before traveling to Baylor to finish the season.
The absolute worst case scenario? Everything breaks the wrong way in other conference series the next two weeks, Texas gets swept by Baylor, and finds itself dropped from its current fifth-place slot to last place and out of the conference tourney. More likely is that Texas will be in the bottom half of the bracket, needing to win the whole tournament for an NCAA bid.
The Longhorns have the talent on hand to make that happen, but this team's psyche appears plain broken. A group Garrido predicted could have been his best team at Texas looks poised instead to be the third in the last four tears years to miss the NCAA Tournament entirely due to familiar struggles at the plate and unfamiliar struggles on the hill, and conversations about Augie Garrido's future at Texas--or lack thereof--would then begin in earnest. Complicating that conversation is the fact that the two times Texas has made the postseason in the last five years, they have ended up in Omaha.
However it shakes out, the Longhorns are in an odd spot for the time being. No game for the next week and a half, then a series against Baylor that is not especially meaningful except to the extent Texas needs to stay in the top eight in the league. After that, in the Big 12 Tournament in Tulsa, the margin for error to maintain Texas' season and perhaps its legendary coach's career is non-existent.