quote:
Or it’s the trend of championship teams lately.

Look at the runners up too.

Oklahoma was runner up in 2022 and finished w a losing recird in the big 12 and were barely over .500 in 2023

Florida this year has a losing record in the SEC and is 1 game over .500 overall

As with all of college athletics, it’s a different game now. Teams are rebuilt every season

No doubt. It's really, really hard to win now. Even harder to do it consistently. The irony is Skip changed the game, making it harder, yet fans still hold LSU to that standard. And it's just not possible any more. So many more teams have invested so much more money on facilities (for fans and more importantly, the players), recruiting, travel, and a host of other things that it's created a ton of parity, particularly in the SEC.

NIL and the portal have played a huge factor the last few years, but we're still seeing the effects of COVID as well. The MLB draft went from 50 rounds to 20, meaning there are fewer drafts 60% fewer draft picks and professional jobs available, so more players are both coming to campus out of high school AND staying in college past their 3rd years. With the free COVID year, guys got 6 years of eligibility if they redshirted (next year is the last year of that, I believe). So that 3rd year hasn't been a lot of their "leverage years" and more of the later round guys are choosing to stay. And a lot of the guys that are really good college baseball players, but have little to no professional prospects--especially with the fewer draft rounds, are coming back their 4th, 5th, and even 6th seasons. So there are a lot more older, experienced teams with more talent than the sport has every seen.

And just like schools are investing in the areas of college baseball that I mentioned earlier, they're also investing in coaching and support staffs. There are coaches being poached from MLB organizations that would have been minor league lifers at worst. Hell, we poached Wes Johnson when he was the Twins' big league pitching coach IN THE MIDDLE OF THEIR SEASON. The money and lifestyle makes the move very attractive for a lot these guys and they're the best of the best. So naturally, they are not only going to help entice more guys to come to campus and the same or different ones to stay--they know they can get just as good or similar development at a big time college program as they would in a few years in A ball. But with much better perks.

So more of the already better players coming to and staying in school longer added to the better development they'e getting makes for a whole lot of better, older, more experienced, and more advanced players than there has ever been before. And there's only so many scholarships, only so many roster spots, that all that talent has to be spread around more, creating more teams each year with a chance to win the CWS. And it makes the margin of error so small, especially in the SEC.

I mean, I don't think there's that big a difference between a 13-17 SEC team and a 17-13 one. Some bad injury luck (hell, LSU may have had the most talented roster in College Baseball history last year, but devastating injuries to Taylor, Edwards, and Shores--back of the bullpen guys who all threw mid-upper 90s almost derailed the season until some guys dropped their nuts and stepped up when we had to have them), some bad baseball luck (the season isn't long enough to always have that even out), and a team talented enough on paper may not make it out of the regionals, or get left out of the tourney altogether. It's really fricking hard to win now