Tuesday, June 3, 2014

NCAA Baseball Tournament Results: One Pac-12 Team Advances to Super Regional play


The number of teams was expected, but the actual team to advance not so much


Five Pac-12 teams entered the NCAA Tournament with aspirations of still being alive today.


Only the Stanford Cardinal have realized that dream.


There was just one Pac-12 team on the one-line, so it's not exactly shocking that there's only one team from the conference remaining. But Oregon State, who was also the No. 1 overall seed in the nation, is not that team. The Beavers were eliminated by UC-Irvine on Monday night in Game Seven.


Stanford advanced to the Super Regionals by taking down the Indiana Hoosiers in Game Seven. And maybe it shouldn't be too surprising that the Cardinal were the only ones to advance. The Big Ten is absolutely awful at baseball, and that allowed Indiana to finish the season strong after getting off to a slow start. But that appears to be more about the competition they faced rather than IU actually figuring it out and getting good.



Obviously, if you finish with a decent record in a conference with a name like the Big Ten, you're going to get national attention. But in the sport of baseball, it should probably be taken with a grain of salt.


Look at the other three Regionals that had Pac-12 teams. Oregon and Washington both fell to SEC hosts, and ASU was over-seeded and lost to WCC and WAC schools.


Stanford will travel to Nashville to take on the Vanderbilt Commodores this weekend. The series will be a rematch of the first weekend of March, when the Cardinal were swept out of town, scoring a total of four runs in three games.


This Stanford team is different from that Stanford team though. The Cardinal are all of the sudden hot, and that walkoff win has to give them a ton of confidence heading back to a place where they didn't have success earlier in the year.


Around the rest of the tournament, the Big 12 dominated. That conference still has four of their five teams that made it in alive, and all four of those teams will be hosting this weekend after the NCAA awarded Texas the Super Regional over Houston. It's crazy that the Big 12 has a realistic shot at having half of the CWS field this year.


The SEC struggled. Ten teams got in, and only Ole Miss and Vanderbilt are still alive. Both of those teams had Pac-12 teams on the two-line, which again shows that Pac-12 teams are unable to be a threat on the road against stingy pitching this year.


The state of Florida struggled the most. Florida, Florida State, and Miami are all gone, and all were one seeds. In fact, only seven of the 16 one seeds are through to the Super Regional round this year, which is insane.


Parity in baseball bit the Pac-12 in the rear this year, but it certainly made for a fun opening weekend. Stanford is the last hope for a third-straight National Championship for the conference. It'll definitely be an uphill battle, but Go Cardinal!






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