2020 Big South Conference Baseball Stock Watch

Image credit: Campbell celebrates last season (Photo by Greg Thompson/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

The Big South is a conference in need of a flagship program. For years it was Coastal Carolina, which won the regular-season title 17 times in 29 seasons from 1988 (the first year the league awarded a regular-season crown) until it left after the 2016 season. 

The Chanticleers not only dominated within the confines of the conference, including going 25-0 in conference play in 2010, but they delivered the Big South a national championship in 2016. 

Their departure for the Sun Belt Conference created a gaping hole in the Big South from a baseball standpoint, and no matter who ends up winning the plurality of conference titles from this point forward, it’s extremely unlikely that this conference is the home to another baseball program of Coastal’s caliber. 

One candidate to fill the power vacuum in the conference, at least initially, was Liberty, a quality program that had spent a lot of time competing with Coastal Carolina near the top of the standings. But the Flames departed for the Atlantic Sun after the 2018 season, and just like that, within a two-year span, the Big South had lost its most successful program, Coastal Carolina, and arguably the team most likely to benefit from Coastal Carolina’s departure. 

Those moves have perhaps opened the door for Campbell to take control of the league. The Camels have won the regular-season title and secured the automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament in two of the three seasons since Coastal Carolina left. 

There is also probably an opportunity to be had for Winthrop, which may not be putting up seasons of 40-plus wins as regularly as it did 20 years ago, but is still one of the most consistent teams the Big South has to offer. 

There was no corresponding move for the Big South when Coastal Carolina left the league, but as Liberty was heading out the door on the way to the Atlantic Sun, it was able to hold the door open for USC-Upstate, which was on the way in from the A-Sun. For the 2022 season, the Big South will be back to 11 members, as North Carolina A&T joins from the MEAC. 

Five-Year Standings
*2020 records not included
**USC Upstate’s record includes 2015-2018 spent in Atlantic Sun
***The NCAA vacated a number of wins for Campbell and Charleston Southern in 2015, but these records reflect results before that action was taken

Team	Big South Record	Winning Pct.	Overall Record	Winning Pct.
Winthrop	78-48	61.90	161-124	56.49
Campbell	75-50	60.00	155-131	54.20
High Point	74-52	58.73	152-122	55.47
Radford	73-53	57.94	146-146	50.00
Gardner-Webb	60-66	47.62	140-135	50.91
Presbyterian	57-69	45.24	131-155	45.80
Charleston Southern	46-80	36.51	106-164	39.26
Longwood	44-82	34.92	101-174	36.73
UNC Asheville	38-88	30.16	91-178	33.83
USC-Upstate	30-77	28.04	107-157	40.53

Campbell might have earned more national attention with its two recent postseason appearances, and more specifically, its run in the 2019 Greenville Regional, but it’s Winthrop that comes out on top in the five-year standings thanks to its consistency in the last five years. The standings also show, in an indirect way, how much the departures of Coastal Carolina and Liberty hurt the top-end quality of the conference. Three teams that were part of the Big South for the entirety of the last five seasons won fewer than 40% of their games in this data sample, in part because they consistently took on losses against those two programs. In the next five years, it seems a safe bet that there will be a more even distribution of wins, with no one team dominating the proceedings and fewer teams really struggling to keep up.

Team-by-Team Five-Year Trends

The following are summations of how each Big South program performed over the last five full seasons. The arrow designation of up, down and to the side represent the results of the last five seasons, not a projection of the years to come.

Winthrop—??

With only the occasional down season here or there, Winthrop has been a contender in the Big South for the entire time the conference has been in Division I, but it did take a step back from 2010-2014, when it finished under .500 in conference play three times. The arrow points up here, though, because the Eagles bounced back from that nicely over the last five years, finishing at least .500 each year, only finishing worse than fourth in the conference once and winning the regular-season title in 2017. The next step for Winthrop is to get back into the postseason, which it hasn’t done since 2006. 

Campbell—??

What Campbell has done the last two full seasons makes a compelling argument that it should be looked at as the next power in the Big South. In 2018, it went 21-6 to win the regular-season title and then earned the automatic bid. In 2019, it took things a step further. Not only did it win the regular-season and tournament titles again, but it reached the final of the Greenville Regional, where it was one win away from advancing to a super regional. Looking at the players the program has put into pro baseball recently, like hard-throwing righthander Seth Johnson and outfielder Matthew Barefoot, only strengthens the argument that the Camels are a team to watch moving forward. 

High Point—??

High Point, which has steadily improved through the years under Craig Cozart, took another step forward in the last five seasons. It finished over .500 in Big South play in each of the last five seasons, peaking with a second-place finish and 19-8 conference record in 2018. The next step is getting to a regional for the first time since the school joined Division I prior to the 2000 season. It came tantalizingly close in that 2018 season, when it lost to Campbell in the Big South Tournament final. 

Radford—??

In 2015, the Highlanders enjoyed the best season in program history. Radford won its first regular-season Big South title with a 20-4 record, won a program record 45 games and got to the first regional in program history. As icing on the cake, it advanced to the final of the Nashville Regional. In 2017, the Highlanders didn’t match the regular-season success, but they did get back to the postseason after winning the conference tournament. 

Gardner-Webb—??

The last five seasons of Rusty Stroupe’s time at Gardner-Webb included some of the best success the program has enjoyed as a member of the Big South. Its 14-10 conference record in 2016 is the best since it moved over from the Atlantic Sun prior to the 2009 season. And with matching 14-13 records in the league in 2018 and 2019, it was the first time that the Runnin’ Bulldogs had finished over .500 in the Big South in back-to-back seasons. Jim Chester took over prior to the 2020 season and will look to guide the program to its first postseason appearance as a member of Division I. 

Presbyterian—??

The improvements haven’t resulted in Presbyterian making its first postseason appearance or finishing higher than third in the Big South standings, but there have been improvements over the last five seasons nonetheless. Specifically, the Blue Hose went .500 in Big South play in 2016, which was the first time that had happened since it joined the league for the 2009 season, and then it was over .500 (both in conference play and overall) in 2017 and 2019. Like so many others in a post-Coastal Carolina Big South, Presbyterian is looking to take the next step, compete more consistently at the top of the league and make its first postseason appearance. 

Charleston Southern—??

In the last five seasons, Charleston Southern struggled to keep up in the Big South, finishing seventh three times, and ninth and 10th once each. The Buccaneers have never been among the group of teams most often found in the top half of the standings, but they were a bit more consistent in the five years prior, such as when they finished third in the league with a 15-12 record in 2011. CSU also finished 30-26 overall in 2014, which is the only time since 1996 that it has done so. After the 2020 season, Mississippi assistant Marc MacMillan was hired to take over the program. He’ll look to lead Charleston Southern to unprecedented success for a program that hasn’t enjoyed much of the sort in recent years. 

Longwood—????

The Lancers spent eight seasons as an independent before joining the Big South prior to the 2013 season. Since then, as is often the case when a program goes from independent to a member of a conference, it hasn’t been smooth sailing, but there have been highlights, such as going 14-10 in conference play in 2016, which is the only time Longwood has finished above .500 in conference as a member of the Big South. Ultimately, the Lancers are still finding their footing in the league.

UNC Asheville—????

Things haven’t been easy for UNC Asheville since 2006, when it made the only postseason appearance in Division I program history. Just three times since then have the Bulldogs won 10 or more conference games. The last five seasons have been a continuation of that, with UNCA going 11-13 in conference play in 2017, but not winning more than nine league games in any of the other four seasons. 

USC-Upstate—??

For the most part, USC-Upstate’s results over the last five seasons, whether a member of the Atlantic Sun or the Big South, are fairly similar to the results of the previous five seasons. The one exception is that in 2012, the Spartans went 16-10 in the A-Sun, which was good for a second-place finish, and 33-20 overall. Nothing in the last five seasons of results can match that, so the arrow points down. After the 2019 season, Mike McGuire took over, hoping to engineer a turnaround similar to the one he pulled off at Morehead State. 

Regional Recap by Year

Year	Team	Results
2019	Campbell	2-2 in Greenville Regional
2018	Campbell	0-2 in Athens Regional
2017	Radford	0-2 in Louisville Regional
2016	Coastal Carolina	3-1 in Raleigh Regional, 2-0 in Baton Rouge Super Regional, 6-2 in CWS
2015	Coastal Carolina	1-2 in College Station Regional
2015	Radford	2-2 in Nashville Regional

The Coastal Carolina 2016 national championship stands alone here, obviously, but there are other positive strides worth highlighting. Radford getting to the regional final in Nashville in 2015 showed that a team from the Big South other than Coastal could get deep into regional weekend. And when Campbell began the 2019 Greenville Regional 2-0 to get one win away from advancing to a super regional, and looked far from a fluke in doing so, it provided evidence that the new-look Big South still had it in it to make a deep run on the big stage.

Top Draft Picks

Player	Year	Pick
Seth Johnson, RHP, Campbell	2019	40th overall
Michael Paez, SS, Coastal Carolina	2016	130th overall
Jeremy Walker, RHP, Gardner-Webb	2016	139th overall
Zach Peek, RHP, Winthrop	2019	181st overall
Matthew Barefoot, OF, Campbell	2019	196th overall

After coming up as primarily a position player at the junior college level, Johnson took to pitching full-time at Campbell and is now the highest-drafted player in Big South history. After 13 and 16 players were selected from the Big South in 2015 and 2016, respectively, just four were taken in 2017, the year after Coastal Carolina departed. Any alarms that might have sounded as a result of that low number were quieted when the number of drafted players jumped back up to 10 in 2018 and then 11 in 2019. The 2019 draft also stands out for the quality of the player taken, with three of the top five from the conference in the last five drafts coming from that single year. Walker is the first one of this group to break through to the big leagues, as he appeared in six games for the Braves in 2019.

Coaching Changes

Year	Team	Out	In
2019	Gardner-Webb	Rusty Stroupe	Jim Chester
2019	Radford	Joe Raccuia	Karl Kuhn
2019	USC-Upstate	Matt Fincher	Mike McGuire

The Big South went without any coaching changes for nearly the entirety of this five-year sample, right up until the offseason after the 2019 season, when three longtime coaches stepped away. Fincher had been at USC-Upstate for 22 seasons, Stroupe had been at the helm at Gardner-Webb for 17 years and Raccuia had coached Radford for 12 seasons. Each of the three new coaches inspired initial optimism. McGuire previously turned Morehead State into a yearly OVC contender, Kuhn was a national title-winning assistant at Virginia and Chester has a long history of winning games as a head coach at lower divisions of college baseball, which should help bring a winning underdog mentality to Gardner-Webb, a program looking for its breakthrough.