Like football, SEC baseball just means more

LSU's Men's College World Series victory was the conference's ninth in the past 14 tournaments. A look at the numbers behind the league's dominance and how it got to this point.

Though its roots go back further, chants of “S-E-C” were popularized after Florida upset top-ranked Ohio State in a 41-14 thumping in the 2007 BCS national championship. Soon, it became a fixture of any triumph of any team from that conference. Considering programs from the league won 13 of the next 16 titles after the Gators’ victory in 2007, odds are good that you’ve probably not only heard the chant, but have often – and to the point of much aggravation.

While it has been behind the curve on a few notable things over the course of American history, the SEC has been an innovator in at least one realm in the broader world of college athletics – getting fans to cheer on teams from the league that they were conditioned for years, decades and generations to despise.

After LSU won the Men’s College World Series Monday with an 18-4 win against Florida, securing the Tigers’ seventh national title in program history, the chant was muted, at least to the point where it wasn’t picked up on ESPN’s cameras. In truth, it didn’t need to be vocalized. The SEC’s teams have done more than enough over the past 15 years to show the strength of the conference they represent, more than reciting those three letters over and over ever could.

With the 2023 iteration now completed, SEC teams have won nine of the past 14 MCWS championships, including the past four and five of the past six. In only one of those 14 years was an SEC team not at least competing in the national title series.

That run hasn’t been the byproduct of the dominance of an extraordinary program or two; over that stretch, seven difference programs have won a ring, from traditional powers like LSU to upstarts like Ole Miss, which won the 2022 title with just a 42-23 record before quickly falling back to a last-place finish in the conference standings this year.

The nine championships in that 14-tournament window are more than ACC and Big Ten programs have ever won in the history of the MCWS, which dates back to 1947, and are as many as the Big 12’s current members have won. That final figure will soon be changing, as eight of the Big 12’s titles have come from Texas (seven) and Oklahoma (one). Both of those programs will be joining the SEC in 2024.

This year’s intra-league championship wasn’t even that much of an oddity. This year marked the third time in the past six tournaments that two SEC teams have met for a national championship series. The league has gotten to a point where it is so good and so deep that it’s hard to prevent its teams from monopolizing the two most coveted positions in the sport.

The SEC accounted for three of the MCWS’ eight teams this year, which also isn’t particularly unusual. Since 2009, when LSU won its sixth championship and this whole run began, 39 of the MCWS’ spots have been filled by SEC programs. Only the ACC, with 23, is within 20 of the SEC, with the Big 12 at 18, the Pac-12 at 16 and the Big Ten at two.

I could keep going on with more numbers and historical context, but by now, you probably get the point. While it’s not as widely celebrated as the conference’s overwhelming success on the gridiron, the SEC is almost as equally dominant in baseball and has shown no real, tangible signs of slowing down, particularly with Texas and Oklahoma soon joining the mix.

How it got to this point is only so much of a mystery.

SEC programs spend – a lot

Money can’t buy everything in college sports – just look at Texas A&M football last season – but it can sure go a long way in explaining why certain schools and conferences excel at certain sports. Even in what’s still billed as an amateur endeavor, success in college sports often comes down to a matter of want-to – that is, how much does this university, its fan base and the region in which it resides want this team to be good.

That want-to can often be measured pretty effectively and accurately in dollars. And going by that, it’s easy to see why the SEC maintains the exalted status it presently enjoys.

Seven of the top nine Power Five programs in baseball budgets come from the SEC, according to the most recent figures from the U.S. Department of Education’s Equity in Athletics Data Analysis. One of the two that isn’t currently in that league, Texas, will be soon enough.

Additionally, 10 of the top 18 programs on that list hail from the SEC. Seven of the SEC’s programs – exactly half of the league – had higher budgets than the biggest spenders from either the Pac-12 or ACC.

“There are little things you can do to close the gap as much as you can, but the reality is you’re never going to close the gap that much,” former LSU coach Paul Mainieri told me in 2016.

According to analysis last year from AthleticDirectorU, the average SEC program shelled out $1.23 million in operating expenses. No other conference’s average was higher than $965,000. Even the conference’s stingiest program – Missouri, at $2.59 million – spends more than 12 of the 61 Power Five schools with baseball teams.

That final number reflects what can be a sobering reality in that conference – even investing $400,000 more into the program than this year’s Big Ten champion (Maryland) gets you a 28-62 conference record and three last-place finishes over the past three seasons.

They have an unmatched and fundamental advantage

Then there’s something not even the millions upon millions devoted to competitive excellence in the sport can buy – climate and weather.

The SEC is the only power conference with the entirety of its membership in the southern half of the country. Sure, it still gets cold during the winter in places like Lexington, Ky. and Columbia, Mo., but even the programs located in those towns don’t face the same limitations and challenges schools located farther north do.

College baseball season begins in mid-February, meaning teams conduct the bulk of their training and practices in January. In balmier climes like Florida and Louisiana, it’s not much of a hassle. But for portions of the ACC, Pac-12 and Big 12, and the entire Big Ten (at least until USC and UCLA join), that means having to make adjustments.

Usually, they’re forced indoors to practice, meaning they can still throw, hit in batting cages and do various other drills, but they can’t scrimmage or field live balls, some of the more rudimentary aspects of preparing a team for a season. At some schools like Pitt, the first time players will put on spikes will be for their first game of the season. And even once the season starts, a team still has to practice which can be a serious meteorological hurdle in the northeast and midwest through February and much of March.

For someone like Mainieri, who spent 11 years at Notre Dame before making the move to LSU, the difference between coaching a northern program and a southern one was drastic.

“I almost feel like I’m cheating,” he told me.

That disparity has been reflected on the field and, more specifically, at the MCWS. Of the past 58 teams to make the national championship series, only four – Oregon State in 2006, 2007 and 2018, and Michigan in 2019 – were from the northern half of the U.S. Since 1967, a northern team has won the MCWS only three times, each of which was Oregon State.

There has been a push by some in the sport to enact legislation that could level what can seem like an imbalanced playing field. In 2014, West Virginia coach Randy Mazey drafted a proposal in which he wrote that the college baseball calendar is “literally unfair for half of the country.” To remedy that, he suggested starting the season the third weekend of April and having the MCWS championship in late August, putting college baseball more in line with the MLB schedule.

He, like others, wasn’t particularly confident there would be any serious or sweeping changes. Look at the SEC and what it has accomplished this century. Why would it ever want things to change?

“It’s been difficult to get done what’s in the best interest in college baseball because there is such a competitive advantage to being a southern school,” Mazey told me two years after he presented his proposal. “Why would you give that up?”

(Photo: USA Today)