It would always have been a long shot for the Kansas baseball team to host an NCAA regional, even after the Jayhawks swept regular-season champion West Virginia, and the slim chance that remained entering the Big 12 Championship evaporated when the Jayhawks lost 11-1 to TCU in Friday’s semifinal.
TCU then proceeded to lose to Arizona in extra innings in Saturday’s title game, giving the Wildcats a trophy in their first season in the league as they had knocked out a pair of higher-seeded teams in the Mountaineers and the Horned Frogs.
All this intraconference battling — a demonstration of, as KU coach Dan Fitzgerald put it, “the parity inside the league” — ended up being to the Big 12’s detriment on a national scale. When the NCAA baseball committee revealed its top 16 seeds late Sunday night, and again as part of Monday’s tournament selection show, not a single team from the league was among them. That meant that for the first time since the expansion of the tournament in 1999, no Big 12 team would get a chance to play at home during the first weekend of the postseason.
Among the top four Big 12 contenders, regular-season champion West Virginia is headed to No. 11 overall seed Clemson, tournament champion Arizona to No. 12 Oregon, TCU to No. 8 Oregon State and KU to No. 3 Arkansas.
Fitzgerald said he thought it was “shocking” to see no Big 12 team earn a hosting spot, given that the league got eight schools into the national tournament in total.
“I think if West Virginia wins the Big 12 tournament, they host,” Fitzgerald said. “I think we probably host if we win it and TCU clearly hosts if they win it. I thought TCU was 100% going to host … Some of the comments, reading about the potential host sites last night, I kind of rushed past them, like, ‘Oh, TCU’s obviously going to host.'”
But, he added, it’s difficult to justify removing any of the teams that did make it in the lower end of the top 16.
“They’re all incredibly deserving,” Fitzgerald said. “I was in the Missouri Valley Conference at (Dallas Baptist) for a long time and we did host, and there was a year that we hosted and Missouri State hosted in 2015, and that’s similar to with Southern Miss and Coastal (Carolina, in the Sun Belt), both incredibly deserving. Hard to say UCLA shouldn’t.”
UCLA and Southern Miss were the Nos. 15 and 16 seeds, respectively. The SEC led the way with eight teams in the top 16, including six of the top seven, Ole Miss at No. 10 and then Tennessee at No. 14.
KU, for its part, has still not hosted a regional since 1994 after falling short of the top 16 this season, though it did break an 11-year postseason drought and earn just its sixth NCAA Tournament berth ever with this year’s appearance.
“There’s always a chip on our shoulder,” outfielder Mike Koszewski said, asked if his team might be motivated by not getting to play at home. “We always just want to go out there and do our best and play our best baseball.”
In any event, Fitzgerald voiced his support for changes to the NCAA Tournament format. He cited a proposal by college baseball analyst Mike Rooney that would feature 32 host sites as part of the first weekend.
“It is an odd sport that you play a weekend series the entire year and then you get to this time, you’re like, ‘Oh, let’s do a four-team tournament,'” Fitzgerald said. “I do think that hopefully our sport does evolve, because you think about if there are 32 host sites this weekend, the excitement that that brings to college baseball would be amazing.”
Big 12 Conference
