College Baseball Tournament Trends

[tulaneoutlaw]

I'm moving this here since the WSU thread has moved on from this topic. This is in response to some chatter between Bay and I, with others chiming in, about the state of college baseball, specifically how feasible it is for a team like Tulane to become an elite program. I made the comment that leadership, while important, isn't the only factor. P5 football money entering baseball is a major thumb on the scales. Here's my attempt to quantify this trend. It's imperfect - criticisms welcome and if I have time I may be open to cutting this data in other ways.

First some parameters. I started this at 1975 which was the first time the tournament featured the regional format; obviously the number of teams varies throughout so I opted to use percentages. I treated P5 teams as the P5 currently exists. There are some potential issues with some teams, like TCU, Louisville, and Utah that were not P5 in all portions of this time series. Conversely, elite programs like CSF that are arguably blueblood college baseball teams are counted with the non-P5. You can find my data and the below chart here:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... edit#gid=0

Now for the chart. I recommend clicking on it to see the labels.



The blue line is % of tournament berths awarded to Non-P5 schools. It's relatively flat throughout various waves of tournament expansion, but you'll note it has only crossed 60% once since 1983 and the most recent years are trending downward as the ACC, SEC, and Big 12 suck up more of the at-large opportunities.

The blue line is the more concerning to me. Throughout this time, there are only 8 spots available in the CWS. In the early part of this range there were a couple of years with no non-P5 CWS teams, but it was much more common to see 2 or even 3 non-P5s make the final 8. That peaked in 1991 with half the CWS field being non-P5. Since then, opportunities have been much harder to come by for the non-P5. There have been only two seasons, 2003 and 2007 with 3 non-P5 CWS participants. There have been 6 CWS with no non-P5s in that same time span, all of which have come since 2011, after a little over a decade of BCS/P5 status kicked in and right on the edge of the TV money gap widening.

The moral of this novel to me is that the path in baseball isn't completely closed, but I stand by my statement that getting back to where things were 20 years ago is going to be much harder. We need to nail our coaching leadership AND see the university throw its full weight behind baseball (and all athletics).

[waverider]

Interesting data. Thanks for compiling all of that.

[GretnaGrn]

Thanks for doing the homework. It's worth noting that there is a middle ground, however, where even if P5 money makes it unrealistic to be a perennial CWS contender, we still at least make a regional more often than not. The gulf between that modest goal and where we are now is depressing.

[ml wave]

All of that is great (well, not great but you know what I mean) but P5 money has no bearing on our ability to compete in our conference.

[tulaneoutlaw]

Thanks for doing the homework. It's worth noting that there is a middle ground, however, where even if P5 money makes it unrealistic to be a perennial CWS contender, we still at least make a regional more often than not. The gulf between that modest goal and where we are now is depressing.

Absolutely. I'm not giving up the line that we can still make regionals on a regular basis and go even further when things break right. One thing I didn't dig into was what the superregional picture looks like since 1999. Is the winnowing of No-P5s happening mostly at the regional level or are they regularly making supers and falling short there? While an expanded tournament means more teams get in, it also means you have to pull more upsets to advance to the CWS.

[wavedom]

Thanks for taking the time to compile that. Confirms what I have said all along.