This settles it! SEC is the best conference

Does anyone else get sick of this arrogance whenever an SEC team has success? Does anyone else get sick of the condescension and lack of respect some SEC people have for other conferences? Where was the SEC four of the last five years? At least these years shut up the arrogant, disrespectful clowns.

 The SEC has the top teams this year. If you want to be proud of the SEC they lead college football in most players arrested every year. It's a sad commentary on the conferences values and who they are willing to recruit. Then there's that arrogant ad " In the SEC it just means more." Yes, winning means more than integrity and academics. When golden boy Tim Tebow was the face of Florida football there were 45 players from the team with arrest convictions.

Do SEC fans need to get a life? It seems their self worth and self esteem is based solely on the success of their sports teams. Ive never seen fans of another conference act like SEC fans.

I've never encountered other fans who think they are better than other people just because they support an SEC team.

Signed, 

PAC 12, Conference of champions

UCLA, first to one hundred

PS: It's just that PAC 12 people are more likely to brag about the academics of the conference

My apologies to the SEC people who don't pound their chest whenever a SEC team wins

Nice burn.

RJM posted:

Does anyone else get sick of this arrogance whenever an SEC team has success? Does anyone else get sick of the condescension and lack of respect some SEC people have for other conferences? Where was the SEC four of the last five years? At least these years shut up the arrogant, disrespectful clowns.

 The SEC has the top teams this year. If you want to be proud of the SEC they lead college football in most players arrested every year. It's a sad commentary on the conferences values and who they are willing to recruit. Then there's that arrogant ad " In the SEC it just means more." Yes, winning means more than integrity and academics. When golden boy Tim Tebow was the face of Florida football there were 45 players from the team with arrest convictions.

Do SEC fans need to get a life? It seems their self worth and self esteem is based solely on the success of their sports teams. Ive never seen fans of another conference act like SEC fans.

I've never encountered other fans who think they are better than other people just because they support an SEC team.

Signed, 

PAC 12, Conference of champions

UCLA, first to one hundred

PS: It's just that PAC 12 people are more likely to brag about the academics of the conference

My apologies to the SEC people who don't pound their chest whenever a SEC team wins

RJM, you need to change your password. I think Skip Bayless hacked your account. 

I am obviously an SEC homer, but this one year says nothing about the "best" conference, imho. All it says is the SEC has its top 2 teams this year still standing at the end. ANY of the 8 teams that were in Omaha this year could just as easily have been one of the final 2. Most of the games were close, evenly fought games and could just have easily gone the other way with a bounce of the ball.

At this stage of the season, the team that gets hot at the right time and maybe gets a lucky break here or there comes out on top. The separation between the teams that I watched was paper thin. 

I will contend that I think the SEC is one of, if not the best, conference. But that is over more than a decade of watching games. If another poster feels the ACC or the PAC 12 or any other conference is better, that's their opinion and they are certainly entitled to that opinion and they could make a strong argument to support their opinion. 

I hope the championship series is well played by both teams. I just hope the Tigers play a little bit better. Sorry that was shameless. 

Very reasonable take, Younggun. As long as you're talking a power conference, I agree.

Best of luck to your boy in the final. 

Thanks JCG. We are gonna need ALL the luck and support we can get. UF had already taken 2 of 3 from us and they certainly are deeper with pitching. We are gonna have to score and score often. 

On a personal level it would be great for Youngun's son to be on the mound with an opportunity to end up on the bottom of a dogpile. 

Of course I am a Pac 12 fan, my son played there. I watch so many guys my son played with now in the big leagues. Man there were some good players. The conference is  good. Maybe a down year this year but not enough thorough knowkedge to back that up.

What I notice as a difference is crowd base, and support of baseball and money the SEC has for its teams. 

In los angeles alone you have USC,UCLA, Irvine, Fullerton, Long Beach, San Diego State, Univ of San Diego( kris bryant)  plus all the smaller NAIA thats just So cal. Very talented pool but lots of teams snd many go away from Cali to play for OSU or Univ of O. Thats just half of one state. 

I saw a lot of very talented kids that amazed me during all these playoffs . So many its hard to point out  love the freshmen catcher for OSU  but loved LSU catcher as well  SS for the tigers really good  and he was in a small slump in the CWS that ended in the last couple games  so getting hot at right time is very important. Hess the closer oh my  hes only a frosh . Amazes me the pitching depth on some of these teams  Their recruitment is top notch for many of these teams. 

I think its good to be proud of your conference but I think D1 baseball is pretty strong esp in elite conferences

pac, sec, acc but lets look at the big west  long beach and Fullerton were in it up to super regionals  . 

Too many very good teams in all the conferences  i love seeing my favorite win but I dnt see a need to say who tbe best is . 

Florida and LSU    I am rooting for LSU    . No special reason just my own perspective that I have. 

Hmmmmm.  Seems to me that the Big South Conference was certainly the best conference just a year ago.  

I thought we new enough about baseball to understand that it's all about the pitching and how good they are on any given day. If they're on hitters have a bad day. When they're off and they are off, hitters feast on fillet mignon.

FSU Fan makes good points. On the other hand, sometimes the bats go flat and pitchers get bye without their best stuff. 

I would generally agree, the SEC is the top conference for Baseball.  I certainly find it the most entertaining conference of teams to watch year to year.

justbaseball posted:

Hmmmmm.  Seems to me that the Big South Conference was certainly the best conference just a year ago.  

I mean, nobody ever said justbb doesn't know college baseball.  Obviously there is humor there, but his larger point is that it was the team and not the conference that won it a year ago.

When it comes to conferences, there are four of them imho - the SEC, the Pac 12, the ACC, and the Big 12 in no particular order.  People may not like to hear that but that is the general case of big time college baseball in this country.  Arguing the SEC is better than the PAC 12 is like arguing chocolate is superior to vanilla - it is a matter of taste. 

When it comes to discussing individual teams however, it becomes a more complicated issue and there are certainly outliers inside and outside these four conferences.  Sure Coastal was an outlier last year but maybe what the average fan does not know is they were consistently knocking at the door years before having their break-thru last year.  Most people do not know that prior to South Carolina defeating UCLA in 2010 for the national title, Coastal played them tougher than any team in the country that year losing two heart-breaking late inning games in the super regionals in which Coastal was a top 8 national seed.  Sometimes good things come out of losing. There are no absolutes in this game.  It's a BIG deal to play in one of the power conferences but obviously there are no guarantees.

Golden Boy timmy's head coach who allowed all of the thugs to play beside him, including Aaron Hernandez, is now at that squeaky clean school Ohio State.  

While I agree that the SEC had the strongest conference this year, I am not sure that really has a lot to do with who ends up in Omaha or in the championship game. It's about handling adversity when your back is against the wall. This prepares you to find a way to win and both teams have have done that in this series.

You can have a better w-l record, but that won't win championships.

Getting to Omaha is a nearly impossible feat, and these boys, all of them, should be proud. 

YOUNGGUN, 

As you know,  we have to root for the Gators. 

Best of luck to the Tigers, I am so happy for them. And please don't feel that you have to defend the conference.  Winning programs don't need excuses. They just know how to get the job done.

Jim T. posted:

Ok. If there's any doubt, I think this year's CWS tournament settled it.  The SEC is clearly the better conference.  Not only because you have an all SEC championship but because of the top to bottom competition in the SEC vs. other conferences namely the ACC.  

.....................................

Agree? Disagree?...Let's hear it!

The CWS is not about the best conference.  Otherwise the Big South would be the best conference last year (as justbaseball suggested)  and the ACC the previous year.   When UVA won it in 2015, I did not think the ACC was the best conference overall.  

The CWS is about the eight teams that catch fire at the end of the year, and prove they have the team depth to carry themselves deep into the post season.  There is no end of season best conference award but I'm willing to bet the SEC is humble enough to accept such an award.

I may not know which conference is the best , but I know the Power 5 Conferences had too many schools invited to the tournament. I would love to see the at large schools lean more toward rewarding the smaller conferences. I think America loves those stories and it would help those smaller schools with recruiting in the future. I mean, yes, the 6th place team in the ACC is good but wouldnt you rather see the team who was winning its division all year but lost in the conference championship get rewarded for having a very good year?

While Davidson was still in the tourney I got emails and calls from the casual fan to tell me how excited they were to see a tiny school beat the big Goliaths. It kept casual fans attention. Much like Coastal did the last couple of years.

NCAA has made the same mistake in basketball too often. Yes the ACC, SEC, PAC, and BIG 12 have great baseball programs, but it would be nice to see some smaller schools play on tv. Do you really want to see the 6th place teams from those conferences play each other? I don't. Isnt it enough they all have their own tv channels?? 

Ok....This was meant to start a "friendly" argument.  Some took it a little too seriously. I do believe the SEC is the best conference on a consistent basis.  I won't compare the SEC against all of the Power 5's but in my part of the country the SEC is pitted against the ACC in the best conference debate.  

The reason I say the SEC is better on a consistent basis is by looking at the bottom rung teams.  The ACC for example has teams who are non-competitive on a perennial basis.  Your top teams can almost be guaranteed a series win if not a sweep when playing the bottom 1/3.  In the SEC, you see a "rotation" of the cellar dwellers.  That to me is a hallmark of a great conference.  

nxt lvl posted:

I may not know which conference is the best , but I know the Power 5 Conferences had too many schools invited to the tournament. I would love to see the at large schools lean more toward rewarding the smaller conferences. I think America loves those stories and it would help those smaller schools with recruiting in the future. I mean, yes, the 6th place team in the ACC is good but wouldnt you rather see the team who was winning its division all year but lost in the conference championship get rewarded for having a very good year?

While Davidson was still in the tourney I got emails and calls from the casual fan to tell me how excited they were to see a tiny school beat the big Goliaths. It kept casual fans attention. Much like Coastal did the last couple of years.

NCAA has made the same mistake in basketball too often. Yes the ACC, SEC, PAC, and BIG 12 have great baseball programs, but it would be nice to see some smaller schools play on tv. Do you really want to see the 6th place teams from those conferences play each other? I don't. Isnt it enough they all have their own tv channels?? 

The way in is play a more challenging non conference schedule and win. RPI has a lot to do with who get invited, who hosts and where teams are seeded.

It's always interesting to see a team have a really great record and not go all the way.  Team in son's high school area had a very good record, and two very good pitchers.  They ended up losing in the second round of state however. many of their stud hitters were pretty silent in these games.

Their head coach is a former Power 5 head coach and they have three former MLB players as assistants.   They were a good team.

RJM posted:

nxt lvl posted:

I may not know which conference is the best , but I know the Power 5 Conferences had too many schools invited to the tournament. I would love to see the at large schools lean more toward rewarding the smaller conferences. I think America loves those stories and it would help those smaller schools with recruiting in the future. I mean, yes, the 6th place team in the ACC is good but wouldnt you rather see the team who was winning its division all year but lost in the conference championship get rewarded for having a very good year?

While Davidson was still in the tourney I got emails and calls from the casual fan to tell me how excited they were to see a tiny school beat the big Goliaths. It kept casual fans attention. Much like Coastal did the last couple of years.

NCAA has made the same mistake in basketball too often. Yes the ACC, SEC, PAC, and BIG 12 have great baseball programs, but it would be nice to see some smaller schools play on tv. Do you really want to see the 6th place teams from those conferences play each other? I don't. Isnt it enough they all have their own tv channels?? 

The way in is play a more challenging non conference schedule and win. RPI has a lot to do with who get invited, who hosts and where teams are seeded.

RJM is correct in his statement.

Smaller programs get auto bids by winning their conference championships. Some programs like Coastal play tough schedules, they are rewarded for that.

I want to see programs get in that have quality hitting and pitching and quality wins.  Even that doesn't always work. 

It's a very long road to Omaha, and personally, I want to see teams that use their staff safely and fairly get there and not have their pitchers throw 250 pitches a few days apart. JMO

Next Level,  I would have to disagree. If a sixth place team or 12th place team in a conference has a better RPI, they should not be discriminated against because of the conference.  For that team to not make the field of 64 and someone with a much worse RPI get in instead, just no.

Play a tougher schedule and win those games

The reason I love baseball is because it can be unpredictable on any given day!

People have to over that 2 SEC teams will play for the championship. Should be a very good series and thats what most people like to ser, good baseball.

Since 2000 the SEC has been represented 12 times (including this year) in the CWS finals, sometimes as both competing teams, won it all 6 times (Including this year).  Not a bad record. 

RJM posted:

Does anyone else get sick of this arrogance whenever an SEC team has success? Does anyone else get sick of the condescension and lack of respect some SEC people have for other conferences? Where was the SEC four of the last five years? At least these years shut up the arrogant, disrespectful clowns.

 The SEC has the top teams this year. If you want to be proud of the SEC they lead college football in most players arrested every year. It's a sad commentary on the conferences values and who they are willing to recruit. Then there's that arrogant ad " In the SEC it just means more." Yes, winning means more than integrity and academics. When golden boy Tim Tebow was the face of Florida football there were 45 players from the team with arrest convictions.

Do SEC fans need to get a life? It seems their self worth and self esteem is based solely on the success of their sports teams. Ive never seen fans of another conference act like SEC fans.

I've never encountered other fans who think they are better than other people just because they support an SEC team.

Signed, 

PAC 12, Conference of champions

UCLA, first to one hundred

PS: It's just that PAC 12 people are more likely to brag about the academics of the conference

My apologies to the SEC people who don't pound their chest whenever a SEC team wins

The bolded is spot on, the SEC has given away any pretense of colligate activity....to some degree most or even the vast majority of schools and conferences have but not to the level of the SEC.

They happily acknowledge that they are the filling the void of professionalism in the south, they have little to no standards but to win and generate money for good ole state. They will overlook damn  near anything if a kid can play...one of the most shocking things to me in the recent past is that UNC was the major school found to have fictitious classes for athletes only, I would have bet a fairly large number it would have come from the SEC. Of course that doesn't mean it isn't happening but as of yet they haven't been caught.

Other then Baylor and Oregon who standout on individual basis the SEC as brand and as a group make a joke being academic institutions.

That being said they do play some damn good baseball!

We can't all be North Carolina, SMU, Southern Cal., Ohio State and Penn State.  But we do our best.

RPI is a horrible metric and needs to be thrown out with the trash in every sport!  There are so many better options that are actually based on solid math theories where 75% of your "score" doesn't come from being in a Power 5 conference.

Suds posted:

RPI is a horrible metric and needs to be thrown out with the trash in every sport!  There are so many better options that are actually based on solid math theories where 75% of your "score" doesn't come from being in a Power 5 conference.

Do you mind me asking how would you decide to award the field if RPI is a bad metric?

There are at least 3 or 4 other calculations that use more data points than RPI such as Sagarin, Burrus, Massey, etc.  For example, every human poll and almost all of the computer ranking models had Clemson behind Virginia.  RPI, of course, had the team with the 5th best record in the ACC ahead.  

I know I am biased but  didnt Clemson did have the stronger schedule., which could have been the deciding point in the end.

But sometimes it does make no sense, because OSUs SOS was ridiculous and they didn't even have to play or win  in their conference.

I think it is more compelling when you see "new"blood in the tourney. Baseball basketball and football. Never going to happen in football because of the "playoff system". America loves it when a "Cinderella" makes the Sweet Sixxteen or better. Same thing applies in baseball. 

It is assumed that the avid fan will watch ,regardless. What the networks and organizers are after is the casual fan viewing their tournament and generating buzz on social media and places where they ordinarily dont get that type of coverage. The sixth place team in the SEC cant generate that kind of buzz. The only way to get that is to let in less Power 5 teams and let other teams and their fans experience playing on a national stage.

Out here in the East , casual fans never got a chance to watch UCSB play until they made a run in 2016. Created a lot of buzz. My in laws are basketball fans but watched the underdog Davidson team knock off UNC.

Power 5 schools have an advantage, no doubt. They get better players because of their advantages. In my opinion it is much more fun when you have a few "Cinderellas" still standing in Omaha. The only way to get there is to invite more "Cinderellas" to the Big Dance.  That would mean you would have to invite less Power 5 non conference winners....America loves the underdog.

I am sympathetic to your argument, NXT LVL, but there is no point throwing weak teams into the mix just in hopes that they can swim and provide a Cinderella story.  It seems like you would have a lot of failure and weak games unless you had a solid method for selecting teams that would actually thrive, and that would take more than wishful thinking.  And anyway you already have 31 automatic qualifiers so there are quite a few Cinderella possibilities already baked into the the system.

In the case of UCSB, they are from the Big West, and while that's not a power conference, it routinely sends strong teams to the tournament including this year's two entries, Cal St. Fullerton and Long Beach State. Both did well, obviously, and Fullerton is typically a top 20 team and has a lot of CWS history. Not really a Cinderella story.  Could you make an argument that the conference is undervalued by the NCAA and deserved another bid this year in Cal Poly?  Absolutely.  But they did only so-so out of league this year. And if nobody has seen much of UCSB lately that's the Gauchos' fault for going 8-16 in league.

Seems to me that a Cinderella team is more likely to come from a conference with smaller schools like Ivy, A10, or West Coast. Davidson's success this year notwithstanding I don't think those conferences have shown of late that they deserve a bigger seat at the table than the one automatic bid they currently get. That's not to say  that outstanding teams can't come out of those conferences; they do.  But when they are outstanding they typically do make the tournament.  Though you could make an argument that the regular season champion of those leagues, not the tournament winner, should get the automatic bid.

I've read somewhere that ehat you say is true for basketball and maybe baseball, but not for football. People like their perennial powers in that area. 

Clearly the SEC East is the best conference. The SEC West can't hold a candle to it.

Now that's funny!!

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Hush puppy!    I'm going to love living in Dawg country.

But, hey.  At least we all hate Aubarn.

im not sure what is settled,   last yr Big 12 had 3 teams make it to Omaha,  yr before it was ACC teams in finals.   I was shocked that SEC had only 10 Natl Championships before last night.    Im pretty sure Pac 12 laps that easily,  Texas has something like 40 appearances in Omaha by itself.  yada yada yada.       Congrats on a great year.  

At some point, though, you have to make a cut off.  Going back 17 years to 2000, the SEC is pretty clearly a dominate conference in college baseball.  Looking at relatively recent history, 30 years or so, and LSU is quite dominant.  Things do ebb and flow though.

These are high times for the SEC right now.  As long as Vandy, Florida and LSU continue to bring jailbait thugs into their baseball programs and maintain substandard academic programs, the SEC will be contenders.