This is an opinion and analysis piece.

South Alabama has missed the Sun Belt Conference baseball tournament once in its history, but needs major help to qualify this year.

Mark Calvi’s Jaguars (23-28, 11-16 Sun Belt) travel to meet Arkansas State (17-31, 6-19) for their final regular-season series beginning Thursday. South Alabama must win all three games to stay alive for the postseason, and even then needs some help to earn a trip to Montgomery next week.

South Alabama is three games out of the 10th and final Sun Belt tournament spot, with Georgia State, Georgia Southern and Old Dominion all tied for eighth at 14-13. The Jaguars have the tiebreaker over Georgia State, but lost two of three to Georgia Southern and did not play Old Dominion.

Georgia State and Old Dominion play a three-game series this weekend, and South Alabama also needs an ODU sweep to secure a postseason spot. Should Arkansas State or Old Dominion win even one game this weekend, South Alabama would sit home for the postseason for the first time since 1985 and just the second time since the Sun Belt tournament began in 1978 (not counting the 2020 season, in which no Sun Belt tournament was played).

(That’s not necessarily to say this is the worst South Alabama team since 1985, however. The Jaguars have had worse record than this season in other years, but still qualified for the Sun Belt tournament because it featured a different format than it does now.)

Still, to say this season has been anything but forgettable would be disingenuous. Despite a midseason run in which the Jaguars won five straight Sun Belt series, they were awful early in the year and have been awful toward the end.

South Alabama enters the final weekend on its second seven-game losing streak of the season, tied for the longest in program history. The Jaguars were swept in conference series by Southern Miss and Coastal Carolina the last two weekends, then lost at Southeastern Louisiana on Tuesday night.

South Alabama’s also virtually assured of finishing a completed season with a losing record for just the fifth time overall and the first time since 2014. The 2020 team was 8-10 and had not yet played a Sun Belt game when the season was halted due to the COVID pandemic.

The Sun Belt appears to have improved greatly in recent years, not just with the addition of Southern Miss and others this season but with Coastal Carolina having come on board in 2018. Those two teams currently top the league standings, and are both ranked in the Top 25 nationally.

This was expected to be something of a rebuilding year for South Alabama, which returned only four regular position players and a handful of pitchers from the 2022 team. But the level to which the Jaguars have collapsed in Calvi’s 12th season has been truly shocking.

South Alabama’s offense has remained fairly static from last season, averaging 6.76 runs per game as opposed to 7.07 in 2022. Center fielder Will Turner and left fielder Joseph Sullivan are two of top offensive players in the Sun Belt Conference, while second baseman Erick Orbeta has been a solid contributor.

The Jaguars’ pitching and defense have fallen apart, however. South Alabama’s team ERA of 6.22 is up more than 1.5 runs from 2022′s 4.73 and up more than 2.5 runs from the 2021 Sun Belt championship team’s mark of 3.57. Only two pitchers who have thrown double-digit innings for the Jaguars — relievers Colson Lawrence and Danny Diaz — have ERAs below 4.00.

The decline of former freshman All-American Jeremy Lee following two years of elbow problems — he has stayed healthy this season, but is 2-7 with a 6.21 ERA — has left the Jaguars without a proven Friday night starter. South Alabama has cycled through several other pitchers in the weekend spots, but none have proven to be a consistent source of quality innings.

Particularly shocking was the Coastal Carolina series, in which the Jaguars were swept despite scoring 27 runs in three games. The Chanticleers scored 38, however, including 11 in the first inning of a 16-10 win in Sunday’s series finale.

While defense is harder to measure, South Alabama’s team fielding percentage of .966 is down significantly from .974 last season. Turner, third baseman Tyler Borges and catcher Diego Altamirano are considered solid glove men, but the Jaguars appear substandard at a number of defensive positions.

The Jaguars’ issues on the mound have been particularly disheartening given Calvi’s background in that department. He is a former college catcher who helped South Carolina win a national championship in 2010 as pitching coach.

South Alabama was also among the best fielding teams in the country for several years until this one. Longtime assistant coach Alan Luckie was largely credited with tutoring the Jaguars’ infielders on the finer points of defense, but Luckie retired after the 2022 season.

Pitching in college baseball can be volatile from year to year, particular for a program that brings in such a large number of junior-college transfers each season as the Jaguars do. That formula has worked well for Calvi in the past, but for whatever reason has not gotten results this year.

Calvi has two Sun Belt Conference championships in the last seven years, something few coaches on the South Alabama campus can say. It’s possible 2023 has simply been a bad year, and not the sign of continued decline in an ever-more-competitive Sun Belt.

Whenever the current South Alabama baseball season ends, perhaps the best thing to do is simply forget it and move on.

Creg Stephenson covers South Alabama athletics for AL.com. Follow him on Twitter at @CregStephenson.