Oregon State, Washington State Baseball Face Uncertain Future Despite WCC Deal
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Oregon State, Washington State and the West Coast Conference announced an agreement Friday that will add the Beavers and Cougars as affiliate members for the next two seasons in most sports. There are two notable exceptions – football and … baseball.
The WCC doesn’t sponsor football and the two schools previously came to a two-year scheduling arrangement with the Mountain West. Where the Beavers and Cougars will be playing baseball after the 2024 season, when the Pac-12 is reduced to just those two teams, is still up in the air.
Officially, the schools “are in continued exploration of opportunities” for baseball, according to Oregon State’s news release. We know a little bit more than that, however. The Athletic reported on Thursday that Oregon State and Washington State have 30 days to decide whether to add baseball to their agreement with the WCC. In the meantime, the schools are considering other options, including independence or an affiliate partnership with the Big 12.
I’ve often written that in realignment, baseball is just along for the ride. Well, for once (ok, twice. Dallas Baptist did move to Conference USA in a baseball-only move a year ago.), baseball isn’t along for the ride. Oregon State and Washington State are looking to make a move specifically for the sport, which is a refreshing change.
It looks like we’ll know by Opening Day where they’re going to be playing for the next couple years. But there is still a lot to be decided. Here’s a Q&A to try to make sense of it all.
How did it come to this?
The Pac-12 fell apart over the last year, starting with Southern California and UCLA announcing in 2022 that they would join the Big Ten in July 2024. Colorado this summer announced a move back to the Big 12. The biggest blow came Aug. 4, when Oregon and Washington accepted Big Ten invitations. Later that day, Arizona, Arizona State and Utah joined Colorado in the move to the Big 12. A few weeks later, California and Stanford secured ACC invitations.
That left Oregon State and Washington State as the only remaining members of the Pac-12. Their long-term home remains uncertain and there’s a reason their deals with the Mountain West and WCC are only for two years. The College Football Playoff contract expires following the 2025 football season and the negotiations about access to the newly expanded playoff will come to a head then. All of that will likely impact Oregon State and Washington State’s ultimate decisions. But something had to be done in the immediate.
What are baseball’s options?
As it stands, it looks like things are still pretty open. There’s a pathway to the WCC, they could go independent or they could end up in another conference altogether, with the Big 12 a leading contender in that scenario.
Let’s start with the Big 12. What would that look like?
It would be an affiliate membership, probably for the same two-season timeframe as the rest of these arrangements. Single-sport affiliate memberships are relatively common in college sports, including baseball. DBU plays in Conference USA on that arrangement, same for Sacramento State in the WAC. What would be uncommon in this case is that it would involve a power conference and a program as prominent as Oregon State.
It’s clear what the Beavers and Cougars would get out of the arrangement. They would join a major conference that has opponents of a similar level and have access to an automatic NCAA Tournament bid.
What’s a little less clear to me is what the Big 12 would get out of this. It would add a high-level baseball program in Oregon State, joining other Omaha contenders in the conference like Arizona, Arizona State, Oklahoma State, TCU and Texas Tech. Oregon State and Washington State could kick in some financial incentives (as they did for the Mountain West in football) and there are some scheduling advantages to being a 16-team league. The biggest advantage for the league might just be bolstering the conference’s image on the diamond at a time when it could use it with Texas and Oklahoma on the way out.
On the flip side, baseball’s not a needle mover in media rights and, unlike basketball, conferences don’t get a payout for having teams advance in the NCAA Tournament. There also would be the added costs for the teams that would have to travel to Corvallis or Pullman.
Under commissioner Brett Yormark, the Big 12 has taken an aggressive stance in expansion. Maybe that will now carry over to the diamond.
What about being independent?
Oregon State and Washington State would be responsible for making their entire schedules and won’t have the benefit of winning a conference’s automatic NCAA Tournament bid, putting their entire postseason fate in the hands of the selection committee. The Pac-12 schedule was 30 games, so that’s the number of games the schools will have to replace in their slates going forward.
Independence hasn’t been attempted much in baseball in the 21st century. Dallas Baptist did it for a decade at the outset of its time in Division I and made regionals three times. A smattering of other teams had short stretches of independence, but really since Miami joined the Big East after the 2004 season, no team at the level of Oregon State and Washington State have attempted it.
The biggest challenge is building a competitive schedule and finding weekend series once everyone else has started playing conference games. If the Beavers and Cougars played home-and-home series and are able to schedule in-state rivals Oregon and Washington on their Big Ten bye week (an arrangement that seems possible, given the schools worked out an arrangement to continue playing annually in football), they would still need to fill seven weekends.
That wouldn’t be easy, however. They would be at the mercy of what teams around the country have a bye on any given weekend. And even then, getting those teams to travel to Corvallis or Pullman wouldn’t be a given, even with the Beavers and Cougars paying a guarantee. That means they’d likely spend more time on the road in the final two months of the season than they do now.
Because Oregon State and Washington State are relatively close to each other, perhaps they could get creative and hold some round-robin weekends with a common opponent to make scheduling easier and defray costs. For instance, if one opponent was brought to Corvallis and played four games on a weekend – two against the Beavers and two against the Cougars – they could split the cost and each walk away with two games and fill a weekend. By playing just two games against a weaker opponent, there would be less of an RPI hit. And they could make up for the fact that they had played just two weekend games instead of three by scheduling a tougher midweek opponent or playing a four-game weekend earlier in the season against better competition.
No matter how creative they are, however, the Beavers and Cougars wouldn’t be able to be too picky about what teams they schedule in April and May and they would likely have to play a very difficult early season schedule. Finding high level games early in the season shouldn’t be a problem but Oregon State and Washington State are both going to have to rachet up the level of difficulty they play early on. Think something like what Gonzaga does – last year the Bulldogs played weekends at Texas Tech, Grand Canyon and Tennessee, and home series against UC Irvine and Oklahoma.
What about the WCC?
I’m sure the WCC would love to take the Beavers and Cougars for baseball as well. The conference has a solid collection of schools, with Gonzaga, Pepperdine and San Diego leading the way historically, but programs like Loyola Marymount (the reigning champion), Saint Mary’s and Santa Clara have also made noise.
The problem is that the WCC last year ranked No. 18 in conference RPI. It was better in the two previous years (11 and 12), but it’s not typically a top-10 conference. It’s not suddenly going to be pushing into the top six or seven even with Oregon State and Washington State, which is where the vast majority of at-large teams and hosts are selected from. Gonzaga pushed to host in 2021 and 2022 but fell short. No team from the WCC has hosted since USD in 2007 and the conference has produced just two at-large teams in the last decade.
Oregon State is a program with Omaha ambitions. It’s hosted regionals nine times in the last 20 years and four of the last seven seasons. It’s looking for the best platform to continue to be in the hosting mix and, failing that, the at-large discussion. Washington State isn’t at that level and hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 2010, but you can understand why the schools are still shopping around.
How does this end?
It truly feels up in the air right now. Independence has its advantages, but the realities are hard. Landing in a league like the Big 12 would be great, but would a two-year affiliate arrangement work for the conference? And the WCC is a fine option, but it seems clear that the schools want to explore other options on the diamond.
The good news for the Beavers and Cougars is that there should be clarity soon, although not until the new year.
