'We're champs': How Georgia baseball soaked up first SEC title in 18 years

The Georgia baseball team had long since poured out of the Foley Field home dugout and the water bottles that were thrown on the field in jubilation had been cleaned up.

The Bulldogs celebration that carried into center field after a 13-8 victory on Saturday night over LSU on May 9 had ended and players had doused coach Wes Johnson with blue sports drink.

Now, some 20 minutes later, it was postgame photo time for the freshly minted 2026 SEC regular season champions.

They gathered in front of the spot on the right field wall where the previous seven seasons of Georgia SEC championships were listed, the last in 2008. Above them on the video board was a graphic that recognized this year’s team as SEC champions.

“Watching the program grow in such a shot amount of time, it’s awesome,” said pitcher Paul Farley, who has been with the Bulldogs for all three seasons with Johnson and got the win in relief Saturday. “We’ve got four SEC games left and to be able to hang that up there the SEC champs already it’s amazing.”

Farley was speaking figuratively because the 2026 numbers weren't on the outfield fence just yet.

Fifth-ranked Georgia (40-11, 20-6 SEC) still has a chance to put a College World Series trip up there in left field for the first time since 2008 and in a best case scenario add another national championship year in right field with the 1990 season.

“SEC champs is great, but obviously we want to do bigger and better things,” Farley said.

LSU, the team that won it all last season, was still around having a postgame talk on the artificial turf field long after the game ended.

Johnson was with LSU in 2023 as pitching coach when it won another College World Series.

“It’s massive,” Johnson said of this latest championship. “Anytime you can win this league, man, it’s so hard. Then win it outright. It’s something you want to check off on your list of things you’ve ever accomplished. It’s 10 weekends of just meat house grinding.”

Johnson said he didn’t know that the dominoes had fallen Saturday to set up Georgia being able to clinch except that he saw that Texas lost at Tennessee as the result flashed on the scoreboard.