Click HERE to view Texas A&M’s postgame press conference.

Game #58: #1 Texas A&M 14, #2 Liberty 11 (8 innings)
Records: Texas A&M (48-10, 16-7), Liberty (49-13, 23-3)
WP: Sydney Lessentine (6-2)
LP: Paige Bachman (11-4)
Box Score

Game #59: #2 Liberty 6, #1 Texas A&M 5
Records: Texas A&M (48-11, 16-7), Liberty (50-13, 23-3)
WP: Elena Escobar (25-3)
LP: Emiley Kennedy (21-6)
Save: Kaylan Yoder (1)
Box Score

After a magical season that peaked with being named co-champions of the 2025 SEC Softball Tournament, No. 1 national seed Texas A&M suffered a 6-5 loss to Liberty in Game 7 of the Bryan-College Station Regional on Sunday night.

With the loss, the Aggies become the first top-seeded team to not reach a super regional since the NCAA Tournament began seeding in 2005.

Backed into a corner and needing to win two straight on Sunday, A&M fought and clawed its way out of holes in both games and played through extra innings to win 14-11 in an afternoon affair to give itself a chance.

However, a five-run sixth inning in the nightcap led to the defeat that ended the Aggies’ season.

“There was so much good about this season,” head coach Trisha Ford said. “It’s just hard because of how this finished.

“These kids worked their tails off all year. They earned everything that was given to them, and we also earned this loss. … It wasn’t on my bingo card, to be honest with you.”

After an emotional rollercoaster of an early game, A&M led 3-1 in the sixth and positioned itself well with just six outs away from the super regional round. But catcher Savannah Jessee’s home run tied the game and forced Ford to remove left-hander Emiley Kennedy in her last moments in Maroon.

“[Kennedy] has been huge for us,” Ford said. “She’s helped build this program. Today just wasn’t her day. That’s sometimes how it goes. We’ve all been there. Unfortunately, pitching-wise, we had a lot of arms that we just couldn’t execute when we needed to.”

Righty Grace Sparks entered the circle and gave up a single and a three-run homer to put the Aggies behind, 6-3.

Needing an answer, Allie Enright’s clutch gene showed up again at the perfect time as she smoked a solo homer 262 feet to put the Aggies within two. Senior Koko Wooley had one more special moment under the Davis lights with an RBI single to cut the deficit to one.

With senior right-hander Emily Leavitt doing her job and going three up, three down in the seventh, all the Aggies needed was one run to save the season.

One run to keep dancing.

A&M put two baserunners on with a single and a walk, but Liberty southpaw Kaylan Yoder fizzed a ball past the swinging bat of Kramer Eschete to end it.

Will Huffman, TexAgs

In three appearances this weekend, All-American left-hander Emiley Kennedy allowed 15 runs on 14 hits across just nine innings pitched.

Ecstasy for the Lady Flames. Heartbreak for the Aggies.

“I want us to be remembered by our grit,” Kennedy Powell said. “We weren’t going to go down without a fight. We fought to the very last out in any and every game we played.”

The day’s conclusion was even harder to stomach after coming back and even needing an extra inning to stave off elimination earlier in the day.

Despite her eight earned runs against the Lady Flames on Saturday, Ford stuck to her guns and started her ace.

However, “Lefty” struggled again, putting A&M in a two-run hole before Ford pulled the senior.

Right-hander Sidne Peters briefly entered, but a Rachel Roupe grand slam put the Lady Flames up 6-0 and the Aggies on the brink.

In the fourth inning, the Aggies finally looked like the team they had been all year, erasing a 6-1 deficit in a blink.

Freshman KK Dement jolted the crowd awake with a home run on the second pitch of the inning. The Aggies kept rolling with four more runs, capped by back-to-back homers from Mya Perez and Mac Barbara.

“The future is very bright,” Ford said. “KK, that kid is special. Like so good, and just a student of the game.”

A&M kept the pressure on in the fifth, with seven straight batters reaching safely to tack on three more runs and put the team in the driver’s seat with a 10-6 lead.

Ford turned to an unlikely face: freshman left-handed spinner Kate Munnerlyn to relieve.

Will Huffman, TexAgs

Texas A&M finishes 2025 with a 48-11 overall record.

The little-used rookie showed her guts and only allowed one more run into the sixth, which she ended on a strikeout with two runners aboard.

A&M added an insurance run in the seventh via a Perez single that scored Wooley, but Munnerlyn’s luck ran out as the Lady Flames tied it with three straight singles and a bases-loaded hit by pitch. Fellow freshman Sydney Lessentine entered and escaped the potential game-winning jam to force extras.

The eighth inning saw Powell single up the middle to score Enright and Eschete right before Kelsey Mathis crossed on a Wooley grounder that grew the A&M lead to an insurmountable 14-11.

Yet those good feelings were erased as the sun set on Davis Diamond and the 2025 A&M softball season.

“I’m excited for this freshman class and also who’s returning next year,” Ford said. “We have pieces, we know this. We just have to keep moving forward, the sun will come out tomorrow.”

For some college graduates, collecting a diploma is an essential step towards a high-paying or professionally fulfilling career. (Maybe even both.) But others are taking a less expected path, finishing up their academic careers and pivoting to blue-collar jobs involving manual labor, including farm work and construction. Does this represent a loss of ambition — or is it more a case of doubling down on what really matters?

Writing at Air Mail, Jeanne Malle explored the growing phenomenon of Gen Z graduates deciding that office work really isn’t for them. The recent grads Malle spoke with opted for a wide range of jobs that you might not expect to be highly sought by people in their early 20s, including farming, butchery and wildlife work. Malle described the appeal of “trades that feel ethically grounded and carry little social risk” among the twentysomethings seeking out jobs in those fields.

This shift isn’t without precedent, though. The last 15 years have seen the publication of a number of acclaimed books that made the case that working with one’s hands can be deeply fulfilling. Both Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry into the Value of Work and Nina MacLaughlin’s Hammer Head: The Making of a Carpenter are compelling books that challenge the conventional wisdom of what a meaningful job can be.

It also seems like no coincidence that Malle’s article was published at a time when there’s a wide-ranging national discussion happening on the subject of higher education. Is the purpose of college — and, more broadly, of education — simply to instruct someone in a trade, or is it to impart a wider range of knowledge and spark a lifelong process of discovery? The graduates profiled in this recent Air Mail article certainly seem to know where they stand.

A ruling in the House v. NCAA settlement is finally expected this week, and part of the resolution will include a new enforcement organization and CEO to oversee college athletics, according to ESPN’s Pete Thamel. The NCAA will relinquish its authority to punish universities, athletic programs and individuals for rules violations and instead hand the power over to a new entity called the College Sports Commission. Thamel reports the CEO of said commission could be announced quickly after the House settlement goes final.

Hiring responsibilities lie with the Power Four commissioners, who are already deep into the process of tabbing the first CEO. The person tasked with leading the College Sports Commission will immediately step into one of the most prominent roles in college athletics at a time in which countless figures across the sport beg for guidance with regard to NIL, revenue sharing and the myriad omnipresent challenges in the modern landscape.

According to Thamel, the expectation is the CEO will likely hail from outside the college athletics universe and is not expected to be a household name to college sports fans. The CEO will earn a seven-figure salary.

When the College Sports Commission takes power following the conclusion of the House settlement, its CEO will report to a board that includes the Power Four commissioners. The executive will oversee newly implemented systems including revenue-sharing salary cap management and the clearinghouse for NIL deals.

$2.8 billion House v. NCAA settlement hangs in balance as attorneys file brief to address roster-limit concern

Brandon Marcello

The NCAA was oft-criticized for its handling of rules violations. The lack of enforcement with regard to the transfer portal, NIL and tampering in particular drew the ire of college coaches and fans alike.

“We still have no idea what the rules are here for August,” Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz said last month amid the ongoing House settlement hearings. “Think about that for a second. College football is fairly significant. It’s a big operation. A lot of revenue. That’s all we talk about anymore, is revenue. A lot at stake here, and we still don’t know what the rules are. It shows you just how screwed up things are, quite frankly.”

The idea of a CEO overseeing college athletics is hardly novel. A handful of prominent college football coaches said this offseason that college football would benefit from hiring a commissioner to manage and enforce rules. Some, including James Franklin, Chip Kelly and Kirby Smart, said that former Alabama coach Nick Saban would be the ideal candidate for such a job.

“I think one of the most important things that we can do is, let’s get a commissioner of college football that is waking up every single morning and going to bed every single night, making decisions that’s in the best interest of college football,” Franklin said during the 2024 College Football Playoff. “I think Nick Saban would be the obvious choice.”