After being swept by the University of Nebraska-Omaha, the Missouri Southern baseball team finds itself on the outside looking in.

The Lions were outscored 31-14 in last weekend’s four-game road series with the Mavericks.

“A lot of things went wrong probably,” Head Coach Bryce Darnell said. “We just didn’t play very good baseball quite frankly.”

The consecutive losses dropped the Lions out of the conference’s Top-8 teams. They will have to crack the conference’s Top-6 teams in order to qualify for the MIAA Postseason Tournament.

“We can’t look at it like that,” Darnell said. “We don’t need to look at it as we need to win ‘x’ amount of games. We need to look at it like, we need the game that we’re playing and play as good of baseball as we can and that’s the way we’re approaching it.”

This weekend, in its senior weekend, Southern will host the Lincoln University Blue Tigers. At 10-23 overall, the Blue Tigers are the conference’s second to last team, so the Lions may have a chance to climb the MIAA standings.

“It’s the last home weekend for the five seniors we’ve got on the team, CJ Matthews, Kellen Hoover, Fernando Lugo, Tyler Jinks and Patrick Deao. All those guys will be honored on Saturday and we’re thankful for those guys and all they’ve done for us..”

Southern used four pitchers in the series-opener and each was touched for two earned runs. Dane Kolkmeyer, Patrick Deao and Dallas Burke all contributed two hits and at least one RBI, but it wasn’t enough to climb out of the hole on the way to a 9-5 loss.

In game two, Deao and Tee Helsel added three and four hits respectively, but starter Michael Mudd gave up all nine runs UNO would score in the first four and two-thirds innings of the game. Mudd eventually gave way to Tyler Jinks and Austin Brown who would shut the door on the Mavericks’ offense, but not before the game was out of reach as Southern fell 9-7.

Again a Southern starting pitcher would struggle as Cody Griebling would go four and two-thirds innings giving up seven earned runs of his own in the third game of the series. Grant Conrad, on in relief, saw four batters and gave up four hits. The Lions offense made no comeback in this game as Zach Croonquist and Andrew Reck combined on the shutout, allowing only four hits in the game.

In the finale, the Lions managed only two hits in a 4-2 loss.