Johnson watching Vitello from afar, not interested in ‘different world’ currently

By Hunt Palmer

For the last five seasons, LSU and Tennessee have been the class of college baseball.

That put Tony Vitello and Jay Johnson, the winner coaches of the last three College World Series, at the top of the sport. Vitello shook the college baseball earth in October when he traded in his Tennessee orange for that of the San Francisco Giants.

The move leaves a massive hole in the Volunteer dugout this weekend when LSU visits the Tennessee for a three-game series. While Johnson will be laser focused on taking down Tennessee, Vitello will be facing the New York Mets.

But Johnson’s watching his former rival.

“I think it’s cool,” he said. “I think it’s awesome. I’m following it closely. That was my team. I’m from Northern California, anyway. It’s a score you check if you turn on ESPN.com. I’m very interested to see how it goes.”

The question must be asked, then. Does Johnson have interest in following Vitello’s footprints from The Greatest Show on Dirt in Omaha to The Show?

“Right now, I have zero interest in that,” Johnson said, candidly. “That’s at this time. I haven’t been offered an MLB job is what I’ll say. I’m fully into this, and there’s a lot we can do to be the best we can be. I want to be the best program in the country forever.”

That answer certainly left the door open in the future for Johnson to take the leap many in sports have taken over the years. Pat Riley, Steve Spurrier, Brad Stevens, Nick Saban, Jimmy Johnson, Billy Donovan and many others come to mind as superstar college coaches who have taken on the highest level, all with varying degrees of success.

With athletes being paid and the transfer portal acting as free agency, some aspects of the college game are more like the pros than ever. Still, Johnson realizes how very different they still are.

“It’s a completely different world,” Johnson said. “If people think college football and the NFL are different, (MLB) and (college baseball) and what goes on, it’s the moon. I’m sure NFL teams have this, too, but the Ivy League has taken over baseball. The general manager and the Ivy League guys at the top a lot of times make the lineup, make the pitching decisions. You can ask Jake Brown if somebody was telling Coach Johnson what lineup we were playing.”

Major League organizations invest massive resources into the analytical side of the sport. Young, precocious front office minds have followed Theo Epstein’s rise as an executive who “broke curses” in Boston with the Red Sox and Chicago with the Cubs.

Data drives player acquisitions, lineup formations, bullpen structure, pitch usage and shape among many other aspects of the game. The bet is that when you zoom out from one at bat in one game and turn it into 162 game simulations, the numbers will win.

In college, it’s a 30-game conference sprint. Plus, the players are more impressionable and often in their teens as opposed to their 20s and 30s. Johnson also enjoys the collective goals of a college squad as opposed to the Major League alternative of trying to stick around long enough to make your money, not necessarily doing what’s best to win that day.

“It’s an individual sport,” Johnson said. “Major League Baseball is an individual sport. It is not a team sport until the postseason. I like being part of a team. That’s where my head and my heart is right now. We’ll see. Things change. This is where I’m at.”