2020 Summit League Baseball Stock Watch

Image credit: (Photo courtesy of Oral Roberts)

Over this extended offseason, we’re taking a close look at every conference in America, using five seasons’ worth of data, including composite records, postseason results, draft results and coaching changes to examine where each league has been and to project where the league might go. 

Historically, the Summit League has been dominated by Oral Roberts, and that was still mostly the case throughout the last five seasons. The Golden Eagles won the league four out of five seasons, capturing the automatic bid each time. 

But it’s that fifth season, the 2019 season, that makes this league most interesting moving forward. For years, it looked as if ORU would simply run this league in perpetuity. Save for the two seasons, 2013 and 2014, when the program was a member of the Southland Conference, it had won the league’s automatic bid into regionals every year between 1998 and 2018. 

It was enough to wonder if there would ever be a challenge to the storied program, but then, 2019 happened. Nebraska-Omaha, which transitioned into the conference while ORU was in the Southland, hit its stride and not only won the regular-season title but also captured the automatic bid. 

Now, there are two separate but related questions to answer. Has the league, or at least Nebraska-Omaha, caught up in some way or did Oral Roberts just hit a fluky down year at a time when the Mavericks were cresting? Also, is this a one-year phenomenon, or now that the door is open a bit, will the top of the Summit League be more competitive for the foreseeable future?

Those questions can only be answered confidently with time, but it’s worth mentioning that Omaha was 10-4 during the shortened 2020 season and the school is opening a new ballpark in 2021, suggesting that the momentum is real on that end. At the same time, ORU was as talented as it had been in a while this season, led by a number of transfers from major Division I programs. 

An existential threat to the conference, at least in the near term, is its membership numbers. Purdue Fort Wayne will officially become a member of the Horizon League later this year. Because Denver, North Dakota, South Dakota and incoming member Missouri-Kansas City don’t sponsor baseball, the conference will only have five baseball-playing programs during the 2021 season, which will force them to acquire a waiver from the NCAA to keep its status as an automatic bid league. 

St. Thomas, currently a Division III school in Minnesota, is eyeing a move to Division I for the 2021-2022 academic year. As a baseball-playing school, the approval of that move would rectify the situation, at least for the time being.

Five-Year Standings
*2020 records not included

Team	Summit Record	Winning Pct.	Overall Record	Winning Pct.
Oral Roberts	113-35	76.35	189-99	65.63
South Dakota State	81-63	56.25	127-136	48.29
North Dakota State	72-76	48.65	125-129	49.21
Nebraska-Omaha	69-76	47.59	107-158	40.38
Western Illinois	63-80	44.06	88-163	35.06
Purdue Fort Wayne	40-109	26.85	88-177	33.21

 

One look at these standings makes it very clear how dominant Oral Roberts has generally been. Even with a down (by its standard) 2019 season that saw the team finish 29-26 overall and 17-12 in conference, Oral Roberts still ran away with things in the five-year aggregate, and it is the only program to finish over .500 overall for these five years. While Oral Roberts has clearly been the best program in the conference, you can also chalk some of that up to the fact that the entire rest of the league has to play on the road for much of the first half of the season, whereas ORU is always able to play home games right away. The Dakota schools also deserve some credit for how consistent each has been, especially given the geographic challenges they face. SDSU, in particular, can be counted on to finish well in the Summit, as it has just one season under .500 in league play in the last five years.

Team-by-Team Five-Year Trends

The following are summations of how each Summit League 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.

Oral Roberts—????

While it might be a sign that it can no longer dominate the league by default, it’s important to not get carried away with ORU’s tough 2019 campaign, especially when examining the totality of the last five seasons. From 2015 to 2018, it went 25-5, 22-8, 25-4 and 24-6 in Summit League play, winning the regular-season title by at least four games each time. Comparing this run to the previous five seasons is tricky because of those two seasons spent in the Southland, both of which ended with the team missing regionals. For that reason, the arrow shouldn’t point down for what the Golden Eagles have accomplished in the last five years, but at the same time, the abrupt end to the dynasty in 2019 keeps it from being an arrow up. 

South Dakota State—??

Over the last five years, the Jackrabbits have been the most consistent team in the conference not named Oral Roberts, with just one season under .500 in league play to their name, but ultimately, the arrow has to point down given what they did from 2010-2014—a conference regular-season title in 2010, a regional appearance in 2013 (albeit in a year when ORU was out of the conference) and three seasons of 35 or more wins overall. SDSU has been good the last five years, but just not quite as good as it was the five years prior. 

North Dakota State—????

North Dakota State has been more consistent in the last five years than it had been previously, as it finished .500 or better overall and in league play three out of five times. That compares favorably to the previous five seasons, when it finished over .500 in the league twice and just once overall. However, the arrow points to the side rather than up because the period of time between 2010 and 2014 also featured some high peaks, including a 40-win season in 2012 and a regional trip in 2014. 

Nebraska-Omaha—??

The arrow is pointing up for the Mavericks in a number of different ways. For our exercise here, having bested ORU in 2019 by winning the league and automatic bid, the last five seasons, even with tough 2017 and 2018 seasons of 12 and 15 wins, respectively, are better than the five prior. And to be fair, Nebraska-Omaha spent part of that previous period of time in Division II. But the arrow is also pointing up in another way, as the program was off to another good start in 2020, and after calling several different facilities home in recent years, including a 2019 season that saw the team forced to play some games at high school facilities due to unplayable conditions elsewhere, a new stadium will be ready for the 2021 season. 

Western Illinois—????

The only remaining charter member of the conference, Western Illinois remains a difficult place to win. The Leathernecks haven’t finished .500 overall since 2007, and more often than not in the time since, they haven’t finished with more than 20 total wins. Incremental improvements were made during Ryan Brownlee’s tenure as coach, including a second-place finish in the conference in 2018, but in the big picture, the results weren’t fundamentally different.

Purdue Fort Wayne—????

Like Western Illinois, Purdue Fort Wayne is a tough place to win. A member of the Summit League since the 2008 season, it never finished over .500 in conference play, although it did have its best season as a member in 2016—a 33-26 overall record with a 14-16 mark in the league. The Mastodons will be interesting to watch as they move into the Horizon League, what with Doug Schreiber their coach. The former Purdue skipper coached the Boilermakers for 18 seasons and led the team to a Big Ten title in 2012.

Regional Teams by Year

Year	Team	Results
2019	Nebraska-Omaha	0-2 in Los Angeles Regional
2018	Oral Roberts	0-2 in Fayetteville Regional
2017	Oral Roberts	1-2 in Fayetteville Regional
2016	Oral Roberts	0-2 in Fort Worth Regional
2015	Oral Roberts	0-2 in Stillwater Regional

 

A No. 4 seed in each case, it has been a rough go of it for the Summit League in regionals of late. If ORU bounces back and becomes an annual regional team once again, one thing to watch is how well it competes once it’s on the national stage. Previous iterations of the Golden Eagles made a habit of getting deep into regional weekend. The 2012 team opened the Waco Regional with a win over host Baylor. The 2011 team advanced to the Fort Worth Regional final. In 2009, the Golden Eagles were a No. 2 seed and got to the final of the Tempe Regional. And until 2015, the last time ORU went winless in a regional was 2007, when it went 0-2 as a No. 3 seed in the Wichita Regional. That, of course, came one year after Oral Roberts advanced to a super regional against Clemson. So while the program was still dominating the league up until 2019, it wasn’t doing damage in the postseason anymore. For ORU to fully restore things to the way they were before, running the Summit League again just feels like a stepping stone to the bigger goal of competing nationally.

Top Draft Selections

Player	Year	Pick
Matt Whatley, C, Oral Roberts	2017	104th overall
Jay Flaa, RHP, North Dakota State	2015	193rd overall
Spencer Henson, 1B, Oral Roberts	2019	285th overall
Zach Coppola, OF, South Dakota State	2015	384th overall
Dylan Snypes, SS, Oral Roberts	2017	457th overall

 

Oral Roberts’ supremacy can be seen through the league’s draft results, although the above table doesn’t really capture it. It’s more about the volume of ORU draftees compared to the other programs. In 2018, for example, all six of the Summit League players drafted were ORU players, one year after four out of five were ORU players. In the last five drafts, Oral Roberts had 18 players drafted. The rest of the league combined had nine. The 2015 draft was a highlight for the conference, as eight players were selected, the second-most all time.

Coaching Changes

Year	Team	Out	In
2019	Western Illinois	Ryan Brownlee	Andy Pascoe
2019	Purdue Fort Wayne	Bobby Pierce	Doug Schreiber
2016	Nebraska-Omaha	Bob Herold	Evan Porter
2016	South Dakota State	Dave Schrage	Rob Bishop

 

Four of the six teams in the league made coaching changes in the last five years. Bishop has done a nice job of keeping SDSU competitive after Schrage left to be the coach at Butler. Schreiber and Pascoe will look to bring success to two programs that haven’t had a lot of it, with Schreiber, as a former in-state Big Ten coach, a particularly intriguing hire. The hiring of Porter, who endured a couple of tough seasons at the beginning of his tenure, has already paid off for the Mavericks in the form of the program’s first postseason appearance in Division I.