After surprisingly taking a series from Vanderbilt this past weekend, Alabama swept Jacksonville State in a home-and-away series over the course of the past two days. After taking the first game yesterday 12-6 thanks to a couple of big innings early, the Tide followed it up tonight with a 5-0 victory in Jacksonville. Miers Quigley had a great showing in the second game, going all the way for the complete game shut-out.

The win makes it four straight for the Tide, and pushes us to a 13-11 overall record. Ole Miss, another top ten ranked team, will be coming to Tuscaloosa on Friday for a very critical weekend series.

All things told, maybe things aren't as bad as we thought. The opening of the SEC schedule was absolutely brutal -- featuring Kentucky, Vanderbilt, and Ole Miss, all three of which are top ten teams -- and if we can somehow take this upcoming series from the Rebels, we will emerge from that brutal stretch with a 4-5 conference record. That's not great, but things will get much, much easier as the rest of the schedule unfolds, and the record should improve accordingly. Also, while the mid-week sweep by UNO sounded bad, I did notice that they beat LSU in Baton Rouge tonight, too, so maybe that's not as damning as we once thought.

Who knows? Maybe these guys aren't all that bad. Time will tell.