The LSU Tigers baseball season isn't quite over, because of next week's SEC tournament, but it certainly feels over at 29-27 with a 9-21 conference record. Without winning the whole thing next week, they likely won't make the NCAA tourney for the first time since 2011 (not counting the shortened COVID season).

Coming off of the program's eighth national championship, this year has been a massive surprise. A bit of a hangover after winning it all is expected, but to play as poorly as they have is shocking.

Jay Johnson is certainly not happy with how things have turned out and will be doing everything in his power to make sure that next year is better. Here were the biggest things that went wrong with the team this year:

It's a bit broad, but there was just nothing that went right on the pitching staff this season. As a team, they finished dead-last in the SEC in the following categories: ERA, runs allowed, walks and wild pitches (they had 27 more than the second-worst team and 41 more than the third-worst).

The pitchers that they were relying on to put up big years struggled. Cooper Moore was the only pitcher to finish with a sub-4.00 ERA and he ended up only making six starts due to injury. Casan Evans was not as sharp as expected, and he also dealt with a lengthy injury on top of that.

Nate Yeskie is a good pitching coach and held develop a fantastic staff last year, but something went wrong this time around. They are going to need sweeping changes on their pitching staff, from personnel to preparation.

People might not guess it because of 27 losses, but LSU actually had the fourth-most runs scored in the conference this season. There wasn't a lot that they did horribly wrong overall, but it was just impossible to know which version of the offense was going to appear on any given day. 

Cade Arrambide and Jake Brown (more on him later) each hit 16 home runs. Omar Serna Jr. had a breakout freshman campaign with nine home runs and a .206 averaged. Mason Braun hit .305 as a freshman. Derek Curiel hit .344. All of these were fantastic, but the bench wasn't reliable and even their bonafide starters hit some rough patches.

Without going into too much detail about specific names, given that a bunch of players had a lot of trouble this season, Johnson really just struck out in the transfer portal. He has said so himself.

Seth Dardar was the best offensive addition out of the portal. He slashed .263/.399/.518, which is solid, but even that was a step down from what he looked like for the Kansas State Wildcats. 

None of the pitching  additions worked, outside of Moore, who was injured.

This is an honorable mention, because there wasn't really anything that the team could have done to avoid it, but this was the moment where the season felt truly lost. Brown was electric when healthy this year and felt like he could provide the spark that the team needed to keep going through the struggles, but he got hurt and the already poor product got even worse.