Jay Johnson’s Latest National Championship Proves LSU Is Built To Last
Image credit: LSU Tigers head coach Jay Johnson is presented the 2025 National Championship Trophy after their 5-3 win over Coastal Carolina Chanticleers in game 2 of the 2025 Men’s College Baseball World Series Championship at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Nebraska on Sunday, June 22, 2025 (Photo by Eddie Kelly/ ProLook Photos)
There was never a guarantee Jay Johnson would do it again.
Not in this era. Not with the volatility of the transfer portal, the arms race of NIL and the pressure of following a national championship at LSU.
But there was always a feeling. A quiet understanding inside the clubhouse, across the SEC and around the country that Johnson was building something sturdier than hype.
On Sunday afternoon, that belief became fact.
LSU beat Coastal Carolina 5-3 to win the 2025 national championship, the second of Johnson’s four-year LSU tenure and the one that removes all doubt.
He is no longer chasing history. He is part of it.
Johnson became just the sixth head coach in the Super Regional Era to win multiple national titles, joining a pantheon that includes Jim Morris, Augie Garrido, Pat Casey, Ray Tanner and Tim Corbin. He is the only coach in the transfer portal era (since 2018) to win more than one. And he did it at a program with expectations so high, anything short of greatness can feel like failure.
That, more than anything, is what made this title different. It wasn’t a breakthrough. It was a confirmation.
“Something that I learned early on was to study the people that are the best at what they do,” Johnson said before the championship series.
He studied them. Now he sits among them.
This LSU team didn’t run from the pressure of 2023. It bore it. Rebuilt from it. Made a second act out of what should have been a full reset.
Paul Skenes and Dylan Crews left as national champions and the top two picks in that year’s draft. What followed could’ve been a valley—the typical post-title rebuild, a year to exhale.
Instead, LSU reloaded with intention. It sprinted forward at full speed.
The Tigers found their next ace in Kade Anderson, a lefthander whose complete-game shutout in Game 1—130 pitches, 10 strikeouts and just three hits allowed—etched his name into Omaha lore and quite possibly into the first pick of the draft, just like Skenes.
They developed cornerstone stars like Derek Curiel and Casan Evans, both still freshmen, each tracking as first-round talents in 2026 and 2027, respectively. And they leaned into the maturity and emotional steadiness of veterans like Jared Jones, whose fingerprints were on every turning point in the postseason—even if they never showed up in the box score.
This wasn’t just a team that could win. It was one that knew how.
That, more than anything, has become Johnson’s fingerprint. His teams do not flinch. They do not fracture. They play with tempo and discipline, toughness and belief. He described his ideal group as something between a Navy SEAL team and casual ping-pong players—tight enough to execute, loose enough to breathe.
This team was that and more.
LSU did not overpower the tournament, it overwhelmed it with intentionality. Every game felt like a move they’d rehearsed, a story they already knew the ending to. That is the product of repetition. Culture. Coaching.
In four years, Johnson has won two national championships and coached two players who could go first overall in the MLB Draft. He has turned LSU into the developmental hub of college baseball—not just in tools, but in toughness. He’s built teams through every imaginable means: transfers, high school recruiting, junior college players, internal development. The method changes. The identity doesn’t.
And that’s what separates him. Not just that he wins. But that he adapts and sustains.
There are louder coaches in the game. Flashier recruiters. More boisterous personalities. But no one in college baseball right now is more complete than Johnson. No one has proven they can match excellence with endurance in quite the same way.
He has become the coach others are trying to copy—and often failing to.
“Jay Johnson is the best coach in our sport,” one active Division I head coach told Baseball America before the start of the national championship series. “Period.”
That’s the thing about greatness. It isn’t just measured by results. It’s defined by replication.
Every coach in the country is chasing the formula Johnson seems to live inside of. They study his roster construction, his staff hires, his pitching model, his recruiting tactics. They emulate. They tweak. But none have recreated the machine he’s now built.
LSU’s win Sunday gave the program its eighth national championship and moved Johnson into the rarest air a college coach can breathe. This was not a one-off. Not a lucky run. It was the continuation of a dynasty shaped by design.
It will not stop here.
Anderson will be gone. Jones too. Others will follow the path to professional baseball. But the Tigers won’t vanish. Not under Johnson. Not with Curiel and Evans waiting in the wings. Not with a coach who has now shown, multiple times, that winning it all is not the ceiling—it’s his baseline.
Jay Johnson studied greatness.
Then he reached it.
And now he wears it.
