College
Niemann, who stands 6-foot-9, was the fourth starter for Rice University in his freshman season of 2002, usually starting midweek non-conference games. He posted a 5–1 record with a 3.11 ERA, including a victory over Washington in the decisive seventh game of the 2003 NCAA regional at Rice's Reckling Park. In 2003, he stepped into Rice's weekend rotation and quickly became the nation's most dominant pitcher. He finished the season 17–0 with a 1.70 ERA and 156 strikeouts, being named Western Athletic Conference Pitcher of the Year, a consensus first-team all-American, and a finalist for the Rotary Smith Award in helping Rice to its first national championship.
Niemann battled injuries as a junior in 2004, but still went 6–3 with a 3.02 ERA in 11 starts, including a complete game victory over Texas A&M in the NCAA regional. The entire Rice weekend rotation, including Philip Humber, Wade Townsend, and Niemann, were all selected in the first eight picks of the 2004 Major League Baseball Draft – the first time three teammates had ever gone so early in the same draft.
Read more about this topic: Jeff Niemann
Famous quotes containing the word college:
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“I never went near the Wellesley College chapel in my four years there, but I am still amazed at the amount of Christian charity that school stuck us all with, a kind of glazed politeness in the face of boredom and stupidity. Tolerance, in the worst sense of the word.... How marvelous it would have been to go to a women’s college that encouraged impoliteness, that rewarded aggression, that encouraged argument.”
—Nora Ephron (b. 1941)
“A whale-ship was my Yale College and my Harvard.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)