Joe’s Notes: The SEC Doesn’t Only Dominate in Football

I’m hesitant to make too much of the College World Series. It’s a magical event, three and a half straight weeks of drama and pressure capped off with a celebration of the sport in a city cosmically predestined to host college baseball. But. It’s a wacky tournament. The double elimination helps, and the absence of parity in college baseball helps, but the thing is a small-sample gone to the extreme. Part of the reason the top seed hasn’t won it all this millennium is probably poor seeding, but the bigger part is that this thing is at many levels a crapshoot.

Still, we’ve had a lot of College World Series in the last 25 years, to the point where our sample of teams reaching Omaha is up to 192 over that timeframe. Here’s how those 192 break down by conference:

And here’s how Championship Series appearances break down:

The SEC’s success isn’t the result of a small sample.

Conference realignment historians will note that the ACC would look better were it to include current members Miami, Louisville, and Notre Dame, who collectively constitute all seven College World Series appearances by the Big East and Independent schools over this timeframe, plus the two Independent championship series appearances. Conference realignment historians will also note that Texas’s accomplishments over these 25 years dwarf those of those three schools even taken as a unit, and that’s without including Oklahoma, the 2022 national runner-up.

The SEC’s success isn’t poised to decrease over the rest of the decade.

It’s a story familiar across a lot of sports: The SEC is better at them than everyone else. College basketball is a noteworthy prominent exception, on the men’s side, but SEC dominance is not just a football thing, and it’s not just a baseball thing. The SEC is better at all the sports, collectively, than any other conference, and it isn’t particularly close. In the 20 SEC sports in which the NCAA crowns a national champion, seven of the championships this year are going to SEC schools, with another four going to Texas and Oklahoma. If the SEC sponsors a sport, there’s about to be a 50/50 chance one of its schools is winning the national title in that sport.

Now, 50/50 is not 100/0, or even 75/25. Sometimes (we’re seeing this happen in a lot of coverage of a certain presidential nomination race), 50% can look like a gigantic probability if it’s being compared to a bunch in the single digits and one or two below 20%. It’s still 50%, though. It’s still a coin toss. The SEC is not so dominant across all sports that it’s thumping the rest of the country. It’s merely matching it, and to be fair, that’s only in the sports the SEC plays. There are a lot of sports the SEC doesn’t play. The NCAA crowned 37 national champions this year, and that’s if we don’t count the redundant FCS champion. The SEC is not running away with this.

Still, winning half of national championships in the sports in which you compete is a ridiculous rate. The SEC’s athletic firepower is close to equivalent to that of the rest of the country combined. Some of this is probably how few sports the SEC sponsors. The Big Ten sponsors 28 sports with national championships, the ACC sponsors 26, Stanford has teams in 31 of the 37. The SEC has a selective approach. It only does the things it’s good at. But even if the SEC were winning only a quarter of national titles, as they can be argued to be doing: That’s a ton of championships. And they’re overindexing in prominent sports.

Theoretically, the Big Ten is the SEC’s counterweight. The SEC and the Big Ten are the two powers in the growing Power Two system. Save for Notre Dame, no school with scholarship football would turn down an invitation to join the SEC or the Big Ten right now. The problem is that the Big Ten just isn’t that good, and the Big Ten especially isn’t that good at the sports the Big Ten is good at. The Big Ten has won one national title in football over the last 20 years, and it almost didn’t happen, Ohio State not only the first 4-seed in history with a path to a national championship but also sneaking into the field after the Big 12 declined to name a single champion. The Big Ten hasn’t won a national title in men’s basketball since 2000. The SEC might not be the best basketball league, but it has three trophies over that timespan. In those 28 sports the Big Ten sponsors with an NCAA national title, Big Ten teams currently hold the crown in only two of them—wrestling (Penn State) and women’s lacrosse (Northwestern). It could be three, with Wisconsin beating Ohio State in the women’s ice hockey title game (the Big Ten only sponsors men’s ice hockey, with only four women’s teams), but even then, it’s only three. Stanford has that many right now by itself. The ACC might be a mess on the business side, with seven of its schools recently actively banding together to explore leaving, but it’s currently holding nine trophies, dead even with the non-UT/OU SEC at 35% of titles in sports it sponsors. Big Ten schools are not translating their television revenue into athletic success.

A commonly speculated scenario in college sports is that the Power Five will break away from the rest of the country. This is a flawed concept for a few reasons (the Pac-12 might only have one year and seven days left in its history), but among them is that the gap on the Power Five/Group of Five border is comparable to the one on the border between the SEC and everyone else. Add in the “Us vs. The World” mentality of a lot of SEC fans (the ones who chant S–E–C all the freakin’ time), and an equally reasonable possibility to Division I breaking in two is the SEC breaking away from the rest of college sports. This is presently unlikely—even with the dramatic fan interest it enjoys across the board, the SEC has a number of sports that couldn’t do a full semi-pro model; and SEC fans enjoy going to Omaha and enjoy beating Clemson or Ohio State in football and all the rest—but just as Tennessee football fans have drafted off Alabama and Georgia and LSU in recent years, chanting their S–E–C chants without being nationally competitive themselves, the rest of the Power Five is drafting off the SEC. There’s a big gap before you get to everybody else.

So, whether Wake Forest was the best team in the country or not, whether the format doomed the Deacs or LSU and Florida were simply both better: The broader SEC-dominance narrative in college baseball is not only not unfounded. It’s also bigger than only baseball.

How Many Runs in London?

In 2019, the Yankees played the Red Sox in London. They combined to score an even fifty runs in just two games. Major League Baseball managed to add three to five feet of space in the outfield alleys, and I’d hazard a guess that they’re using their deadest balls, but I am concerned. I’m seeing an over/under of 13.5 runs. That is concerning.

It’s not that high-scoring games don’t favor the Cubs. The Cardinals do hit the ball in the air more—St. Louis is 13^th in the majors in fly ball frequency, the Cubs are 25^th—but Justin Steele and Marcus Stroman are both dramatically more inclined to induce groundballs than their respective opponents, Adam Wainwright and Jack Flaherty. The Cubs’ bullpen is on the opposite side of it, allowing more fly balls than the Cardinals’, but it isn’t dramatic.

What I’m worried about here, for the Cubs, is that Steele and Stroman will get chased early, and that the Cubs will give up what would be a sizable advantage at Wrigley Field or Busch Stadium. What I’m also worried about, though this is less founded, is Steele or Stroman getting spooked after seeing the ball fly out of the yard half a dozen times. I hope David Ross is telling these guys to prepare as though they’re playing baseball on the moon. That’s what this is.

There’s also the cynical side of the situation, where the Cubs might not achieve my wildest dreams and get into contention over this next month (I’m not dreaming too wildly these days). In that situation, Marcus Stroman getting lit up can’t help his trade value. It might not hurt it at all—I’d imagine most teams will look at it reasonably—but it’s not going to help, if it happens.

Then, there’s the rest piece. The Cubs have to come back from this, take one day of rest, and then play thirteen games in a row against the Phillies, Guardians, Brewers, and Yankees, all of whom are very much in the playoff picture. It’s the rare case where day games at Wrigley (the Cubs will get them next Friday and Sunday against Cleveland) are going to be advantageous for body clocks, because even three nights in London should be enough to get the Cubs a little jet-lagged.

It’s not concerning enough to say the Cubs need to sweep the Cardinals this weekend. A split would still be a great result. But it’s a little concerning. I hope they’re sending Jameson Taillon and Kyle Hendricks home a day early to rest up for night starts Tuesday and Wednesday.

NASCAR at Nashville

NASCAR’s at Nashville this weekend, the first of ten remaining Cup Series races before the playoff field is set. To be honest, I thought it was fewer. I think I got confused because I remember the second Daytona race happening in July but I also have already gotten used to it as the playoff play-in race. That’s on me.

As a little bit of a reset, in case you’ve been out of touch with NASCAR this year (certainly not me…), here’s who’s in which playoff category:

Already Won a Race (10 drivers)

• Martin Truex Jr.
• William Byron
• Ryan Blaney
• Kyle Busch
• Christopher Bell
• Denny Hamlin
• Joey Logano
• Kyle Larson
• Tyler Reddick
• Ricky Stenhouse Jr.

Currently in Playoff Position (6 drivers)

• Ross Chastain
• Kevin Harvick
• Chris Buescher
• Brad Keselowski
• Bubba Wallace
• Alex Bowman

Currently Out of Playoff Position (everybody else but I’m only listing the noteworthy one)

• Chase Elliott

There are, again, plenty of other drivers, but Chase Elliott’s the main one to watch in the outside category, and Wallace and Bowman are very much currently on the bubble, with only 16 races run and potentially a few new winners left.

The Elliott situation is fascinating, as something of a NASCAR outsider myself. The guy hurt himself snowboarding and missed six races, which wasn’t a great look but wasn’t so bad that there was any reason for NASCAR to not give him a playoff waiver (they give these if guys have to miss regular season races, but they make you do a waiver process so you can’t just skip regular season races). Like Alex Bowman, who broke a bone in his back during a Sprint Car event and missed three races, and like Noah Gragson, who suffered a concussion from a crash during the Cup race at St. Louis, Elliott was getting a waiver for the snowboarding injury. Then, Elliott dramatically and obviously intentionally wrecked Denny Hamlin and earned himself a one-race suspension. Again, though, NASCAR gave him a waiver.

So now, Chase Elliott’s situation is this: The 2020 champ and Most Popular Driver (actual award) has to either win a race or make up what’s currently an 84-point deficit over ten races, which would come out to beating Bowman by an average of about eight spots per race (it’s more complicated than that, but that’s the scale of the points). That deficit will probably grow, too, because we’ll probably get new winners.

Elliott’s got great chances ahead of him—there are two road courses in the next ten races and he dominates those, in addition to being competitive most everywhere—but it’s a good storyline to watch, and a nice one for NASCAR with Elliott sixth on the odds board and the five drivers ahead of him all already holding a win. He’s the guy to watch at Nashville.

What Will Become of Nate Silver’s Women’s World Cup Model?

The Women’s World Cup is less than a month away, and we have no idea whether Nate Silver’s model for it will be live and active. This is a big story for a segment of our readers because we like to bet futures here at The Barking Crow, and we like to use probability models to bet those, and having no international women’s soccer model ourselves (we could try, but it wouldn’t be pretty), we would like to use the one built at FiveThirtyEight by, I believe, Nate Silver and Jay Boice, especially after their men’s World Cup model performed very, very well for us this past winter.

We’ll keep tuning in, but that’s something on our radar, and we wanted all those riding with the bets to know. (How about those Royals last night, by the way? Talking baseball. Talking bets. Not talking British Monarchy.)