OMAHA, Neb. — Illinois and Nebraska, the only reasonable locks from the Big Ten to make the NCAA baseball postseason next week, played Friday in separate elimination games at the conference tournament.
Michigan eliminated the regular-season Big Ten champion Illini and will meet Penn State on Saturday. The Huskers, who finished second in the league, advanced with a win against Ohio State to next play Indiana.
The Nittany Lions and Hoosiers need two victories this weekend here at the home of the College World Series to earn the Big Ten’s automatic bid to one of 16 NCAA Regionals, set for unveiling Monday. The Wolverines need three wins. All but Nebraska face desperate situations.
MICHIGAN TO THE SEMIS ‼️#B1GBaseball x @umichbaseball pic.twitter.com/ySIWuU6Qrg
— Big Ten Baseball (@B1Gbaseball) May 25, 2024
Such is the state of Big Ten baseball.
The Big Ten languished after Michigan’s 1984 CWS appearance and didn’t send another team to college baseball’s eight-team celebration until Indiana broke through in 2013.
The talent and competitiveness in the league have increased in recent years. Indiana outfielder Devin Taylor, a five-tool prospect and anticipated first-round pick in the 2025 MLB Draft, takes the field Saturday morning. Undefeated Nebraska pitcher Brett Sears, an All-America candidate, silenced Purdue on Thursday before the Huskers’ other ace, Mason McConnaughey, dominated against the Buckeyes.
“The Big Ten is the best it’s ever been from top to bottom,” Iowa coach Rick Heller said. “There’s not an easy win in the league, especially this year.”
So why is the conference set to send no more than three teams to the NCAA Tournament? Meanwhile, the SEC — the Big Ten’s equal in wielding clout in college athletics — uses its league tournament as a tuneup, what with five teams projected by D1Baseball.com as regional hosts and 11 in the 64-team NCAA field.
Well, obviously, baseball is a much bigger deal in the SEC. And in the ACC. And the Big 12.
But the Big Ten, perhaps starting when Nebraska joined the league in 2011 — with its impressive fan support and three CWS appearances in this century as a member of the Big 12 — has cared more of late about baseball.
Indiana showed Big Ten programs that Omaha is not just a dream. Michigan in 2019 came within one victory against Vanderbilt in the best-of-three championship series of a national championship.
The Big Ten put a respectable five teams into the tournament three times from 2015 through 2019.
It continues, though, to fight an uphill battle. In 2022, Rutgers won 44 games and finished second in the league. It didn’t make a Regional.
This year, a cascade of nonconference losses in February and March put the Big Ten in an inescapable hole.
Only the Huskers, in part through some scheduling good fortune, survived with a strong RPI. They played 17 of 18 games in the first six weeks of the season against teams that will enter June with top-100 RPIs. Nebraska won 12 of those 17.
Even after suffering several ugly midweek losses in April and May, Nebraska — thanks to that early foundation — carries an RPI of 31 into this weekend. D1Baseball projects the Huskers as a No. 2 seed in the four-team Regional at Oklahoma.
The same projections place Illinois as a No. 3 seed at Kentucky.
The fateful blow for all the others? During five to six weeks of Big Ten travel to start the season in February and March, “you’ve got hope that you hit a home run,” Heller said, in picking strong opponents and finding road victories.
In the best-case scenario, only a few Big Ten teams can pull through in good shape.
“And then we kill each other in the league,” Heller said.
Heller recalls in 2022 that Nebraska started slowly on the road. Iowa went to Lincoln in April and won two of three games with 5,000 fans in attendance for each.
Despite the series win, Iowa tumbled in the RPI.
“It’s just stupid,” Heller said.
And it’s not changing, unless leaders in the sport agree to an overhaul. It must include a later start to the season, Heller said, allowing Big Ten teams to safely schedule home games early in the season and build a base of victories while playing more conference games like the SEC.
The SEC has opposed previous pushes by the Big Ten to delay the start of the season. Big Ten coaches said in Omaha this week that they have a strong advocate on the national stage in second-year commissioner Tony Pettiti, who worked in Major League Baseball before he took over the Big Ten in April 2023.
Heller said he believes a “window of opportunity” exists to make transformative changes in baseball as all of college athletics undergoes a metamorphosis amid the newly reached settlement in the House vs. NCAA class-action lawsuit.
The imminent entry of USC, UCLA, Oregon and Washington figures to boost the Big Ten baseball profile in the long term. Full scholarships and a new roster limit are possibly on the way. Why not look at a system that evens the access to resources — like warm weather and home games in the first month of the season — largely needed to compete for championships?
“I really believe the rest of the country knows it’s the best thing for the game,” Heller said.
A year ago, Iowa won 44 games and played deep into a Regional. Heller had a dangerous team again this year. It featured Brody Brecht, a hard-throwing right-hander forecasted as a high pick in the 2024 MLB Draft. But the Hawkeyes’ RPI dropped south of 100 after they played six early games against Auburn, Virginia, Ole Miss and Georgia — and lost all but one.
Iowa finished 14-10 in the Big Ten and tied for fourth. As Texas A&M, the fourth-place finisher in the SEC, sat in position to receive a top-eight seed on this holiday weekend, the Hawkeyes headed home for the summer after a 4-2 Thursday loss in 10 innings against Illinois.
A touch of concern about next week, incidentally, followed the Illini to Omaha. It lost out-of-conference games against Wake Forest, Coastal Carolina, Florida State, Tennessee and mid-major force Indiana State.
Illinois won the Big Ten at 18-6 by two games over Nebraska. Its RPI hovers in the low 40s.
“It’s in the back of all of our minds,” Illinois coach Dan Hartleb said.
“I tell our guys throughout the year, don’t leave anything in somebody else’s hands. And the only way you can assure yourselves to get in the tournament is to win and keep winning. So the more wins we get, the better our resume is, and you force the committee to look harder at your situation.”
Coaches of the regular-season champion in other power leagues don’t often say anything of the kind to their players. If the power structure of the sport didn’t tilt decidedly to the South, neither would it have to happen in the Big Ten.
(Photo of Mason McConnaughey courtesy of Nebraska Athletics)
