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Hickey: College baseball has surpassed college basketball in quality. Will it last?
By Alex Hickey
Published:
Last week felt like a watershed moment for a pair of college sports. Two ships passing in the opposite direction, if you will.
In the College World Series, history was likely made.
The probable top 3 picks in the upcoming MLB Draft — LSU pitcher Paul Skenes, LSU outfielder Dylan Crews and Florida outfielder Wyatt Langford — were all in the championship finals. On top of that was Florida pitcher/first baseman Jac Caglianone, who was a finalist for the Golden Spikes Award along with Crews and Skenes.
A wealth of future pro talent displayed on the sport’s biggest stage. As many as 6 players from 5 teams who played in Omaha are expected to go in the top 10.
It was a different kind of history in the NBA Draft.
Only 1 player selected in the top 5, Alabama’s Brandon Miller, played college basketball.
Some college basketball fans likely had little-to-no knowledge of the 4th college player drafted, Central Florida freshman Taylor Hendricks. UCF finished 7th in the American Athletic Conference and lost in the second round of the NIT. Not appointment viewing.
Hendricks was a second team all-American Athletic Conference selection and wasn’t even the league’s freshman of the year. (That was Houston’s Jarrace Wallace, who was taken 1 pick ahead of Hendricks.)
Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe, the 2022 national player of the year, did not even get drafted. Zach Edey, the 2023 national player of the year, may be making more money by electing to spend another season at Purdue.
At the moment, it’s evident that college baseball has overtaken college basketball as a consumable product.
But is it a permanent sea change, or just a temporary takeover?
A role reversal
For decades, the top prospects in the NBA Draft were already household names to serious basketball fans. You could watch them play dozens of games before they were ever drafted.
The top MLB prospects? Unless you showed up to their high school at the risk of looking like some kind of weirdo, they were just names on a board.
Take the 1999 version of the draft in each sport, for example.
The top 3 NBA draft picks were bona fide college stars — Duke’s Elton Brand, Maryland’s Steve Francis and UCLA’s Baron Davis.
No. 4 pick Lamar Odom burst onto the scene by leading Rhode Island to the Elite Eight. Wally Szczerbiak, the sixth pick, was a star after leading Miami (Ohio) to the Sweet 16. No. 7 pick Rip Hamilton led UConn to the 1999 national title. Utah’s Andre Miller — a 4-year starter! — led the Utes to the 1998 national title game. And then stuck around another year before being selected 8th overall.
The 1999 MLB Draft wasn’t bad, producing 4 future All-Stars in the top 10. But 6 of the first 8 players selected were high school prospects. And the 4th college player taken, Ben Sheets, came from way off the beaten path at Northeast Louisiana. It was probably impossible to catch the then-Indians anywhere but in person.
A quarter-century later, the pre-draft roles have flipped.
NBA teams favor untapped potential over college production. That’s why a player such as Hendricks is gone before most of us even knew him.
Baseball fans have a chance to actually become familiar with prospects before the draft.
When the Chicago Cubs drafted Kyle Schwarber in 2014, for instance, there was excitement because many fans had already seen him lead Indiana to the College World Series. Pittsburgh fans are currently debating whether the Pirates should draft Crews or Skenes first overall because they’ve actually watched both play enough to weigh in.
I wouldn’t even know where to begin watching an Overtime Elite game to check out future NBA prospects. (OK, it’s apparently on Amazon Prime, but you get the point. There is very little way of building an emotional connection to a commercial product that has no civic ties. Because the product isn’t made for fans. It’s made for developing talent.)
Why college baseball is gaining momentum
MLB’s draft rules are one reason for college baseball overtaking college basketball.
If you play Division I college baseball, you can’t enter the draft until after your junior year. Players either sign out of high school or go to junior college if they want to go the one-and-done route. (Typically, that path is taken by players who couldn’t agree to terms with the MLB team that drafted them out of high school.)
It is increasingly unusual to see a basketball player who stays in college beyond his sophomore season get selected near the top of the NBA Draft. This year the first junior drafted was Marquette’s Olivier-Maxence Propser. He was picked 24th.
We are a long way removed from being excited about a Final Four because it presented an opportunity to watch Patrick Ewing face Michael Jordan and Sam Perkins or Hakeem Olajuwon and Clyde Drexler.
Why college basketball could rebound
There are a couple factors that could give men’s college basketball a resurgence in popularity.
Name, image and likeness opportunities are changing the game. Talented players like Edey, Hunter Dickinson and Drew Timme stick around because there is more money in being a college star than bouncing between the G-League and the NBA.
In a sport ravaged by transient rosters, fans can once again get familiar with their stars and watch them grow. Experienced rosters play better basketball. That’s how you end up with San Diego State in the national championship game. (Of course, the flip side of NIL is that it can also create a different form of one-and-done.)
There are a couple other factors that make it unlikely for baseball to actually surpass men’s basketball as the NCAA’s de facto No. 2 sport.
Baseball has a bizarre scholarship system. Coaches can divide 11.7 scholarships among 35 roster spots. And with that system in place, there will always be scores of top players who sign out of high school rather than take their chances.
Baseball’s other great inhibitor is geography.
In the Big Ten, the sport’s place in the pecking order is below football, men’s and women’s basketball, wrestling and hockey. Its spring sister sport, softball, is arguably a notch ahead as well when measuring the B1G’s strength against peer conferences.
The top tier of college baseball is more entertaining than the top tier of men’s college basketball. But when you measure both top to bottom, basketball still has the advantage. Even though the men’s national title game drew record-low ratings (11 million), it dwarfed the record 3 million who watched the College World Series final.
Unless the season is pushed back 2-4 weeks, it’s impossible for baseball to be more than a niche sport in half the country. Baseball, like soup, is not as enjoyable when it’s cold.
College basketball’s place in the hierarchy is safe for now. But if baseball ever tweaks its scholarship rules and schedule, that is subject to change.
Alex Hickey is an award-winning writer who has watched Big Ten sports since it was a numerically accurate description of league membership. Alex has covered college football and basketball since 2008, with stops on the McNeese State, LSU and West Virginia beats before being hired as Saturday Tradition's Big Ten columnist in 2021. He is an Illinois native and 2004 Indiana University graduate.