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Rough start leads to UC Bearcats baseball elimination in Big 12 tournament by Texas Tech
Faced with another elimination game in the Big 12 tournament at Globe Life Field in Arlington, Texas the Cincinnati Bearcats picked the wrong night to have a rough start.
Strapped for pitching, the Bearcats had to start Michael Conte for the first time all season. Conte had primarily been a reliever, but playing on consecutive days in the Big 12 can take its toll.
In the first two innings, Texas Tech touched up Conte for eight runs on six hits and that was enough as the Red Raiders sent the Bearcats home 10-5.
“I thought Mike threw the ball pretty well, a couple soft-contact base hits, then it snowballed a little bit,” UC head coach Jordan Bischel said. “True to our guys, we didn’t implode, we didn’t melt down.”
Role players brought to press conference
An emotional Bischel brought reserves Cole Harting, Sean Springer and Kameron Guidry to the interview room with him. None of them played in the game.
“We had a lot more players that could help this team than I had spots in the lineup,” Bischel said. “We have three guys here that have done tremendous things for this program and didn’t get a chance to show it this year. These guys are special human beings. If anyone has the question, how did we do what we did this year? It doesn’t happen without these guys showing up with an incredible attitude and enthusiasm.”
Bischel then turned to the players and told them they didn’t know what they meant to him.
“It might not have been what we were used to or we wanted, but being part of a team like this was special,” Guidry said. “It was something we never got a taste of and never really imagined.”
Red Raiders strike early and often
Gage Harrelson and Damian Bravo led off the game with singles, then a Kevin Bazzell ground-rule double plated the game’s first run before Conte had recorded an out. Texas Tech would never trail.
They had five runs in the first and three more in the third giving starter Ryan Free a comfortable lead for the evening. Free would go 6 2/3 innings allowing four hits and three runs for the victory as the No. 10 seed Red Raiders took down the No. 5 seed Bearcats.
Bearcat bullpen strong in loss
After Conte, Joey Hurth, Chase Horst, Drew Erdmann and game one starter Nathan Taylor held Texas Tech to just two hits and two runs over the final 7 1/3 innings. But, UC had just five hits on the night which is not conducive to winning tournament baseball games.
Along came Jones
Catcher Alec Jones went out with a bang for UC, walloping two home runs and collecting three of UC’s five hits. He drove in four of the five runs. Lauden Brooks and Luke Sefcik were the only other Bearcats to collect a hit.
What now?
UC baseball’s RPI was 55 prior to the start of the game according to DI Baseball. That figure will likely change with the loss and affect their NCAA chances.
The 32 wins by the Bearcats is the most since their 31-win 2019 season when they advanced to the NCAA tournament with the automatic berth from the American Athletic Conference.
“It was the best year I ever had,” Sean Springer said. “Having fun with my guys every day.”
Both Baseball America and DI Baseball had UC among the “first four out” of the NCAA tournament before Thursday night’s affair in Arlington. Official bids are awarded on Memorial Day, May 27.
“This was a statement year and put Cincinnati on the map a little bit,” Harting said. “It was a group of guys I didn’t think would ever bond and we did. We found a way to do it and found a way to win games.”
The state of Texas recently purchased about $5 million worth of bitcoin through a BlackRock-administered exchange-traded fund, a representative for the state comptroller’s office confirmed in an email to The Dallas Morning News on Monday.
The purchase came several months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law Senate Bill 21, a high-profile and controversial legislative effort that enabled the Texas comptroller’s office to establish a publicly funded strategic cryptocurrency reserve.
It also amounts to one of the first-ever cryptocurrency transactions by a state government amid a broader federal and state government embrace of the recently surging crypto industry. Other states, including New Hampshire and Arizona, have passed similar crypto reserve bills.
And last year, Wisconsin’s and Michigan’s pension funds also purchased crypto, although with the comptroller’s purchase Texas has now become the first state to actually fund such a reserve.
“The industry is maturing and growing — it’ll continue to become more mainstream, and I think Texas staking out a leadership position will be very beneficial to Texans over time, similar to what the oil and gas industry has done over the last century,” said Lee Bratcher, president of the Texas Blockchain Council, a crypto lobbying group that championed the state legislative effort.
“I think we’re only scratching the surface,” Bratcher said.
The state made the roughly $5 million purchase through BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust ETF (IBIT), a fund managed by the major asset management firm that trades in U.S. dollars but generally reflects the price of bitcoin. As of early afternoon Monday, IBIT was trading around $48, reflecting a roughly 20% loss over the past month and a 13% decrease since the beginning of the year.
Those valuations broadly align with the recently highly volatile price of bitcoin: Early this year — amid a crypto frenzy inspired largely by the new, extremely crypto-friendly Trump administration — the world’s predominant cryptocurrency soared to above $100,000 for the first time in its history, and then in early October reached an all-time high above $126,000.
Since then, though, as fears have grown about a cooling economy and a potential AI bubble that could send the stock market plummeting, valuations of cryptocurrencies have also dipped. One bitcoin traded at around $85,000 on Monday, near the digital coin’s lowest price since April.
FILE – In this April 3, 2013 photo, a 25 Bitcoin token is displayed in Sandy, Utah. (AP Photo/Rick Bowmer, File)
Rick Bowmer / AP
‘Placeholder investment’
The state of Texas made its purchase late last month at a price around $87,000, according to a social media post by Bratcher, who said he first learned of the state’s purchase through a recent Zoom call that included acting Texas Comptroller Kelly Hancock. The comptroller’s office did not respond to a question from The News asking about the specific price the state paid for its IBIT purchase.
The ETF purchase is “a placeholder investment,” said Kevin Lyons, a representative for the comptroller’s office, until the agency formally contracts with what it’s referring to as a cryptocurrency custodian. The agency is now reviewing responses from a request for information it issued and will later award an official contract, Lyons said.
While the new state law did not include a specific funding amount, Texas legislators have since allocated $10 million to the reserve. The amount represents a tiny fraction of the state’s $338 billion state budget, although the legislation’s supporters have argued it still amounts to an important measure of support for an emerging industry.
“I think with Texas leading in this way, it’s going to reap benefits for many decades to come across the state,” Bratcher said. “From a job creation perspective to a tax revenue perspective and everything in between.”
Earlier this year, addressing legislators ahead of a vote on SB 21, state Rep. Giovanni Capriglione, R-Southlake — one of the driving forces behind the crypto push — struck a similar note, calling the reserve bill “a forward-thinking measure” that was about “recognizing digital assets not as a trend but as a strategic opportunity” and “strengthening the state’s fiscal resilience.”
Yet even if Texas’ public crypto investment remains minuscule, many economists and fiscal watchdogs have criticized SB 21 along with other recent pro-crypto legislation on multiple fronts, arguing it amounts to a lobbyist-driven effort that’s likely to benefit the crypto industry much more than the state’s residents.
And while Texas has recently embraced bitcoin mining and other facets of the industry, with even Abbott pushing to make the state a global “crypto leader,” critics have pointed out that cryptocurrency itself has long been plagued by concerns about scams, corruption and energy use.
“It’s also backwards to our values in Texas,” John Griffin, a finance professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said earlier this year.
“Basically you have a conservative legislature saying, ‘We want less government,’ and yet here’s a case where you are wanting or encouraging government to speculate and possibly prop up an asset class.”
Texas A&M fans, you may now exhale. The regular season has come and gone, and there is plenty to be proud about after the 11-1 season.
The Aggies may have ended said regular season with a loss in Austin to the Texas Longhorns, but for a team that has been chasing playoff glory for decades now, there is nothing to be ashamed of.
The 11 wins that the team notched are the highest since their 11-win season back in 2012, Johnny Manziel’s Heisman Trophy-winning campaign.
With their success, the Aggies were a force to be reckoned with in the weekly AP Top 25 polls, reaching their highest rank since the 2020 season that saw them at No. 4.
The Aggies started the season ranked at No. 19 after the 8-5 season they had in Mike Elko’s first year as head coach, though the addition of wide receivers KC Concepcion and Mario Craver kept them in contention as one of the best in college football.
The Aggies were predicted to finish eighth of 16 SEC teams in the SEC media poll.
The A&M offense was as advertised through their first two games, with wins of 42-24 and 44-22 over the UTSA Roadrunners and Utah State Aggies, respectively, boosting them three spots.
Defeating a top 10 team will definitely get you props from the Associated Press, and the Aggies found themselves in the top 10 for the second straight season after their 41-40 win over No. 8 Notre Dame in South Bend.
The Aggies didn’t even have to play during Week 4 to move up one spot, as then-No. 9 Illinois took a massive loss to Indiana, plummeting them and moving A&M up one during their bye week.
Texas A&M held off a late charge by the Auburn Tigers in their conference opener to take a 16-10 win, and losses by Florida State, Penn State, and LSU, who were all ranked above them, shot the Aggies up to the doorstep of the top 5.
A 31-9 pummeling of the Mississippi State Bulldogs was enough for Texas A&M to overtake the Oklahoma Sooners in the ranks, despite Oklahoma defeating Kent State 44-0.
The Aggies defeated the Florida Gators with a sound 24-17 score, and after the Ole Miss Rebels suffered a near loss to Washington State, the Maroon and White were promoted one spot on the AP list.
The Ags marched into Baton Rouge and annihilated the LSU Tigers 49-25, and after the Miami Hurricanes’ loss to the Louisville Cardinals, A&M moved up to their highest ranking since the 1995 season, when R.C. Slocum was still calling the shots.
Mike Elko’s team stayed in third behind the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes and No. 2 Indiana Hoosiers, continuing their perfect season, which included their comeback win over the South Carolina Gamecocks until they finally tasted defeat at the hands of the Longhorns in the regular season finale, 27-17, dropping them down to No. 7 and out of the SEC Championship game.
The Aggies will now wait to see who the College Football Playoff gives them in the first round, as they will likely host an opponent at Kyle Field.
For the first time since the 2010 season, the Texas A&M Aggies took a trip to the Texas state capitol to combat their in-state foes, the Texas Longhorns, while looking to keep their undefeated season alive through the regular season.
Unfortunately for Mike Elko’s team, that wasn’t the case after 60 minutes at DKR, as the Longhorns would come back from a 10-3 halftime deficit to outscore A&M 24-7 in the second half, and after two interceptions by quarterback Marcel Reed late in the fourth quarter, the Aggies’ first loss of the season was in the books in a 27-17 finish.
And after being at the forefront of a team known for flawless performances in the second half of 2025, Texas A&M coach Mike Elko wasn’t too fond of Friday night’s results, needless to say.
During the opening statement of his postgame press conference immediately following the loss, Elko praised the Texas team for their efficiency in the second half and expressed his dismay with his own team’s performance.
“Yeah, I mean obviously give them (Texas) credit,” Elko began. “They went out in the second half and made the plays they needed to make to win the football game. From our perspective, just very disappointed in how we played in the second half. We didn’t play Texas A&M football at all.”
After expressing the heartache of coming up short in the rivalry game for the second year in a row, Elko made it clear that his team was going to be focused on the next task at hand, competing for a national championship.
“Uh, it hurts. It should. This game means a lot,” said Elko. “We got to regroup though and we’ve got to get ready for the playoffs.”
As for actually embarking on those preparations for the College Football Playoff, Elko admitted that he wasn’t exactly in the right mindset to turn the loss into motivation moving forward.
“I don’t know that we’re thinking like that right now,” Elko said. “I think we’re just thinking about not getting the job done tonight and coming out of this weekend, maybe we’ll regroup and figure out moving forward what the positives are of 11-1 right now. It just hurts that we lost to our rival.”
For the second straight year, Texas A&M’s chances to compete for a conference championship were dashed at the hands of the Burnt Orange, and now the Ags will wait patiently through the championship weekend coming up to see what their own fate is regarding the College Football Playoff next week.
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