OMAHA, Neb. – None of the 24,734 in attendance at Charles Schwab Field quite knew what was happening in the bottom of the first inning of game two of the 2025 Men’s College World Series finals when Coastal Carolina head coach Kevin Schnall was given the heave-ho by home plate umpire Angel Campos.
Campos, apparently, heard something from the Coastal Carolina dugout and issued a warning for arguing balls and strikes, which got Schnall out of the dugout to figure out what the warning was for. When Campos shooed him away, the fireworks started.
“I’m 48 years old. I shouldn’t get shooed by another grown man. When I walk out to find out what the warning is, a grown man shooed me,” Schnall said. “At that point I can now hear him say, ‘It was a warning issued for arguing balls and strikes.’ At that point I said, ‘Because you missed three.’ At that point, ejected. If that warrants an ejection, I’m the first one to stand here like a man and apologize.”
Schnall then came out of the dugout to get his money’s worth, and first base coach Matt Schilling came to the plate to do the same, an umpire tripped and fell backwards on his rump in front of 25,000 people, and suddenly Schnall and Schilling were gone.
No “bump” from Schnall as he was accused of on the field, in fact you see an umpire extend his arm toward his own crew member as if he was pushing him out of the way while stumbling
Of note: the NCAA has already changed their language in their official statement. Took all of 1… pic.twitter.com/SBW45p8Lc8
— Quentin Mills (@Qmilllyy) June 22, 2025
For its part, the NCAA issued a statement citing the rules violated and why the ejections were proper, given the circumstances.
Official statement from the NCAA pic.twitter.com/CRVjyEBraO
— Ryan McGee (@ESPNMcGee) June 22, 2025
Late Sunday evening, Coastal Carolina issued a statement, saying, “The ejections of Kevin Schnall and Matt Schilling in the bottom of the first inning drastically altered the trajectory of a must-win game for our team. These decisions were made with an alarming level of haste, without an attempt at de-escalation, and deprive our student-athletes of the leadership they have relied on throughout the postseason.”
Proud of @CoastalBaseball. The 2025 season is one TEAL NATION will remember 4 a long time. Congrats to LSU, a great team that earned this championship.
However, on the game’s highest stage our coaches should have been there throughout, but that opportunity was taken from them pic.twitter.com/pQ9pgk5kab
— Chance Miller (@cmiller05) June 23, 2025
You can’t argue balls and strikes from the dugout, so Campos’ warning was proper. Schnall deserved an explanation of the warning, and Campos should have given him a better explanation and shouldn’t have dismissed him. After all, Campos did work 585 games over seven seasons in the Major Leagues, so it’s not like he’s new at this. He’s been heavily criticized before, rated, evaluated, and dealt with plenty of angry managers and coaches. He’s one of the best umpires out there, regardless of what everyone thinks of him right now, and had a bad moment yesterday when he pulled the trigger too quickly on Schnall.
This is one of those situations where everyone is right and wrong at the same time, and unfortunately, perhaps the game did turn on Schnall being sent to the clubhouse early, and his team ended up losing 5-3 to LSU in their final game of the year.
For his part, Schnall lived up to the values he professes to his players and about his program.
“Two words that define our program are ‘own it.’ And what does that mean? It means you have to own everything that you do without blame, without defending yourself, without excuses,” Schnall said.
“If you guys watch the video, there was a guy that came in extremely aggressively, tripped over Campos’ foot, embarrassed in front of 25,000, immediately goes two games suspension and said, bumping the umpire. Immediately does that. There was no bump. He was embarrassed. I shouldn’t be held accountable for a grown man’s athleticism, he continued. “They’ll retract it, though, because now it’s excessive and the reason it was excessive because I was trying to say, I didn’t bump him.”
Schnall is, in a word, intense. He’s a competitor, he’s relentless, he’s an old-school baseball coach. But his personality did him no favors when he worked the umpires yesterday, and his team had to pay the price for it.
Schnall admitted as such, and while his ejection may not have set a great example for coaches and players who look to top college coaches for inspiration, his statement after the game taking responsibility was something every coach should take notice of.
Who Do You Want To Play For? – In an era of college sports where winning is paramount and the money seems to get bigger every day, Murray State head coach Dan Skirka is a breath of fresh air.
Skirka, 40, is the humble leader of the team no one expected to be in Omaha. As I wrote earlier, Skirka and the Racers got to Omaha because of their team culture. A program’s culture starts with the coach, and while nowadays a college coach — in any sport — does a lot of things, from recruiting to administration to game management to technical coaching — they’re teachers first and foremost.
The real aim of college sports isn’t a conference championship, a national championship, or NIL money — it’s to produce educated men and women who are better co-workers, better partners, and better people, who can apply what they learned in college, both in the classroom and on the field, when they go pro in something other than sports, as that NCAA TV commercial told us so many times. Skirka recognizes that.
“To be able to do that through this great game, it teaches all those life lessons, and I share my stories. I’m from humble beginnings, right, but to open up and to tell them what I’ve been through to help them,” he said at the media day press conference.
“And it hits home more now, with my son being nine, and wanting to be the type of coach that I want him to get to play for. And I get it, when parents are turning their sons over to me and our coaching staff to lead them, to develop them, we take that seriously. It’s a daily effort. And a lot goes into it, like I said, we’re prepared to win baseball games, but at the same time we’re trying to prepare future husbands, dads, future bosses, and trying to do it the right way. And a byproduct of that is winning some baseball games, getting to do something cool like this.”
The Pitch Clock Didn’t Slow These Games Down – College baseball is played with a 20-second pitch clock, which ostensibly speeds the game up. Even with the pitch clock, only two of 13 games played in Omaha this year clocked in under three hours. The first was Arkansas’s 3-0 win against Murray State in which Gage Wood threw just the third no-hitter in College World Series history, and the other was game one of the finals, in which LSU’s Kade Anderson threw a three-hit complete game shutout against Coastal Carolina. Both games took two hours and 31 minutes to complete. The next shortest game took three hours and one minute each; that was the series opener where Coastal Carolina beat Arizona 7-4 on June 13. The longest? LSU’s 9-5 win against UCLA, which was played in three hours and 41 minutes, and featured nine pitching changes, a lightning delay, and an overnight suspension.
The Real Game Is In the Stands – My friend Art Clarkson, the longtime Birmingham, Ala.-area sports executive who was a four-time Southern League executive of the year when he was general manager of the Birmingham Barons, loved to say, “The real game is in the stands.”
Clarkson, who passed away in 2019, would be impressed with the attendance numbers in Omaha this year. The 13 games at Charles Schwab Field drew a total of 342,676 fans, an average of 26,360. That average, as of today, would rank 20th in Major League Baseball, ahead of Washington, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Cleveland, Kansas City, Minnesota, Pittsburgh, the Chicago White Sox, Miami, Tampa Bay, and the Athletics.
You Are a Student-Athlete – The quote of the series award goes to LSU’s Jake Brown. At the media day in advance of the finals, Jones and Anthony Eyanson were asked about their game preparation, and Jones said of how Jay Johnson’s staff gets the Tigers the information they need to win, “We came here to play baseball. We’re not really scholars. So he does a great job of laying it out for us and making us go out there executing as simple as it can be.”
“We came here to play baseball, we’re not really scholars. So he (Coach Johnson) does a great job of laying it out for us and making going out there and executing as simple as can be, so super thankful for that.” — Jake Brown pic.twitter.com/74U2CzAPfD
— Harrison Cordell Fant (@Fantavious9) June 20, 2025
That’s A Lot Of Crawfish – Barrett’s Barleycorn Pub and Grill on Leavenworth Street in Omaha has become the go-to haunt for LSU fans in town. A source told World Baseball Network that Barrett’s boiled 700 pounds of crawfish, which were brought up from Morgan City, La., to keep Tiger fans sated in Omaha.
Our own @LeifSkodnick spotted the Mike the Tiger Mardi Gras float outside Charles Schwab Field! LSU will face UCLA tonight at the 2025 #MCWS! Who ya got? pic.twitter.com/yhhlAkKnfi
— World Baseball Network (@WorldBaseball_) June 16, 2025
And in addition to all that crawfish, Mardi Gras Mike drove up from the West Bank, across the river from New Orleans where floats for the Mardi Gras are built and stored. Mardi Gras Mike is a 30-foot long float of a tiger that was spotted at numerous locations in Omaha this week. The video in the post above was taken a few days after I got out of the car. I heard the strains of Mel McDaniel’s “Louisiana Saturday Night,” a favorite among Tigers fans, coming from Mike Fahey Street outside the ballpark and knew I had to get my camera ready. All of which is to say that LSU fans are a different breed. If you’ve never been to a football or baseball game in Baton Rouge, you don’t know what you’re missing.
WBN NCAA: https://worldbaseball.com/league/ncaa/
Photo: Coastal Carolina head coach Kevin Schnall, left, screams at the umpires after being ejected in the first inning against LSU in Game 2 of the NCAA College World Series baseball finals in Omaha, Neb., Sunday, June 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Rebecca S. Gratz)
