How does the Big Ten compare with other conferences?
By Cassady Palmer @crpalmer0627 June 23rd, 2025
With the end of the college baseball season and the crowning of yet another SEC champion, I was curious to see just how the historical postseason numbers break down for some of these conferences and, in particular, how the Big Ten has fared. This led me down a longer rabbit-hole than I anticipated, but the results were quite stark to say the least.
Over the last 10 years, excluding the 2020 season that did not have a postseason, the Big Ten has averaged 3-4 teams reaching the Regionals each year compared to 9-10 teams for the SEC and 8 teams for the ACC. While I imagine that the addition of the West Coast teams to the Big Ten will improve that number long-term, they’ve only been in the Big Ten for one of the past 10 years and could just supplant older Big Ten teams in the postseason rather than boosting them in the short term. Taking it a step further, only five total Big Ten teams have reached the Super Regionals in that same time span including UCLA this year; no Big Ten team has made the Supers more than once in that stretch. By comparison, the SEC has 54 combined Supers in the last 10 years while the ACC has 37.
And as far as champions are concerned? The Big Ten has had six College World Series (CWS) champions since 1947, the most recent being Ohio State in 1966. The SEC has had more champions in the last 10 years than the Big Ten has had… ever. In fact, the SEC has won the last six straight CWS, matching the Big Ten’s historical championships. The Big Ten was actually quite dominant on the national stage in the 1950s and 1960s, with Minnesota, Michigan, and Ohio State combining for the six titles. It would be another 53 years before a Big Ten team would reach the CWS finals when Michigan ended the 2019 season as the runners-up.
Drilling down even deeper, we can look at the consistency of individual teams reaching the postseason within the different conferences. Not counting the 2025 Big Ten newcomers who have just one Big Ten postseason under their belts, Indiana and Nebraska lead the way as the most consistent teams to reach the postseason with six postseasons out of the last 10. Michigan and Maryland were next up at an even 50% postseason rate. The SEC and ACC both boast higher levels of consistency at their top ends, with three SEC teams (LSU, Vanderbilt, and Florida) having reached every postseason in the last 10 years. In total, and also excluding the 2025 conference newcomers, nine SEC teams and 10 ACC teams have made the postseason at least 60% of the time compared to just the two from the Big Ten. That is just over two-thirds of longstanding SEC and ACC teams reaching the postseason at least more than half the time.
We can also take a look at how often teams miss the postseason multiple times in a row. Regardless of then-conference, Indiana, Maryland, Nebraska, and UCLA each have a longest postseason miss streak in the last 10 years of just two consecutive postseasons, topping the conference whose average longest miss streak is five seasons. The average length of all miss streaks in the Big Ten is three years. So, in simpler terms, when a Big Ten team misses a postseason, they will on average miss two additional consecutive postseasons before reaching their next Regional. The SEC has an average longest miss streak of two years, while the ACC’s is three years. The average length of all SEC miss streaks is just under two years while the average for ACC teams is just over two years. This means that when an SEC or ACC team misses the postseason, they will typically miss just one more additional postseason before returning to the Regional.
All this to say, it is extremely difficult for any Big Ten baseball team to be consistently dominant, particularly in regard to the postseason. Even the new West Coast additions have had their struggles. USC had missed eight consecutive postseasons prior to reaching the Regionals this year, and they are historically the winningest team in the CWS. Oregon missed four straight postseasons before rebounding after the pandemic, and Washington hasn’t reached consecutive postseasons in more than two decades. Add to this the fact that more than one-third of the more longstanding Big Ten teams have reached zero or one postseason in the last decade, and it illustrates how difficult things can be for the conference. The SEC has just one team that did not reach the postseason in the last decade (Mizzou), while the ACC has just two (Virginia Tech and Pitt) with zero or one postseason.
I’m not writing this to say that Big Ten fans should not have high expectations for their teams or that they shouldn’t have Omaha-related aspirations. There’s a certain magic in the college baseball world where 4-seeded Murray State can take out Regional host Ole Miss and Super Regional host Duke on the way to their first ever CWS after winning their first ever conference tourney. But it can also be true that some Big Ten fans may need to better align their expectations within the context of reality. Whether it’s some artifact of Northern baseball, a lack of strength at the bottom of the conference, the fact that the Big Ten has largely been irrelevant in the postseason since the 60s, or all or none of the above, winning at a high level consistently in the Big Ten is extremely challenging. And one rough year does not mean that the sky is falling and all is lost. In fact, in the Big Ten, a single bad year means you’re doing far better than the average.