06-23-2023, 02:30 PM
(06-23-2023, 01:32 PM)CTcard Wrote:(06-22-2023, 07:18 PM)StanfordMatt Wrote: I cannot imagine that there has ever been a NCAA sport in which one conference has so thoroughly dominated with the depth and variety of domination matching what the SEC has done over the past six seasons in baseball.
The specifics may be unique in this recent SEC run. This is particularly true in the number of teams to win over a short spell.
It's clearly the current top baseball conference.
However, the best college baseball conference that ever existed was the Pac 10 South, the old Six Pac; particularly in its earlier years.
It lasted from 1977 through 1998.
Arizona, ASU, Cal, Stanford, SC, UCLA.
Amongst those teams they have 25 NCAA championships.
The key thing about the league is that it had no bottom, every game was versus a tournament quality team and they played home and home weekend series against everyone.
It was also small, so had few teams in the tournament every year. It never dominated the number of host sites.
One thing to remember is that the SEC has 14 teams and gets around 10 into the tournament each year. That a lot of rolls of the dice in a sport that often comes down to a fair amount of randomness. In fact, that randomness itself is reflected in the number of different champs, which in general were not the best team in the SEC itself.
[Similarly, in the days of the Six Pac several NCAA champs were not the best team in the Six Pac, including Stanford in 1988.]
Thanks for the history lesson, CT! It was before my time but fascinating to go back and look at some of the results from that era. It appears the Sun Devils were still part of the WAC when they won the title in 1977, but the 1978-81 stretch in which ASU, UA and SC all claimed titles is certainly comparable. Also interesting that it was another west coast team, Fullerton (then coached by Augie Garrido), that was the one outlier with its title in 1979. Another household name, Terry Francona, was the MVP of the Wildcat team that won in 1980.
