West Virginia baseball will be on the clock in 2016

COMMENTARY

MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — For the 19th consecutive year, the NCAA baseball regionals don’t include West Virginia.

The Memorial Day reveal held no drama for the Mountaineers, whose 27-27 record and plus-100 RPI didn’t put them anywhere near the bubble. A rebuilding season capped by a tidy exit from the Big 12 tournament will be remembered most for WVU opening a splendid new ballpark, not so much for what the home team accomplished inside of it.

If you’re keeping score, West Virginia finished 8-10 at the Monongalia County Ballpark, 4-11 against NCAA tournament teams and 1-8 against the RPI top 50. In a weak year for the Big 12, the Mountaineers went 9-15 in league action, including series losses to the bottom two teams, Baylor and Kansas. Amid those pedestrian numbers, coach Randy Mazey contended his team “overachieved,” a jarring assertion for some fans to digest, though probably accurate.

MORE: The complete NCAA baseball bracket

After three years in Morgantown, Mazey must begin resetting the bar for overachieving. He forecasts a day when WVU will celebrate cracking a regional, not merely escaping the Big 12 cellar. Such is the state of ambition transition for West Virginia, mired in an NCAA drought that dates back to the Clinton era.

That’s a ton of poor history to reverse. You can blame the cold, which induces indoor practices and forces WVU to spend the season’s first month on the road. You certainly could fault Hawley Field for lacking curb appeal, bathrooms and most of the amenities expected at a D-I park. And there was no denying that former coach Greg Van Zant suffered from the school’s reluctance to fully fund the 11.7 scholarships the NCAA affords baseball.

The issues regarding scholarships and the ballpark have been addressed. The weather won’t be, unless there’s expedited global warming or expedited common sense from the NCAA, which could give a nod to competitive balance by making college baseball a summer sport.

The climate disparity is huge between WVU and the Texas schools, but not so in Kansas, where the Jayhawks and K-State both have reached the NCAAs during the Mountaineers’ Big 12 tenure. (The average February lows in Manhattan and Lawrence are actually a smidge colder than the 23-degree chills Morgantown experiences.)

For deeper comparisons, every other Big 12 team except Baylor has made the NCAA tournament at least once since WVU joined. Over a three-year stretch, the Mountaineers rank sixth of nine in conference winning percentage (.449), remarkably ahead of Texas (.430). The Longhorns mitigated their slide with a College World Series berth last season.

Mazey suggests West Virginia occasionally could become a CWS contender, though step one is making the field of 64. That’s something Mazey accomplished as the head coach at Charleston Southern in 1996 and three times in three seasons at East Carolina before his firing in 2005. During his six seasons as an assistant at TCU, the Frogs never missed a regional.

Mazey’s first three WVU teams were perceived as moderate successes, primarily because expectations were so daunting entering the Big 12. Yet the 2014 team was more talented than given credit. Blessed with six draft picks — which tied for most in the Big 12 — that squad was on pace to break through before a year-end meltdown squashed its NCAA chances.

The Mountaineers lose four position-playing seniors this year, including regular-season Big 12 home run leader Taylor Munden, but they could return every pitcher who threw meaningful innings. That roster continuity, and the ability to recruit to a $21-million ballpark, should put Mazey on solid footing for Year 4 and WVU on a trajectory to end two decades of mediocrity.

Down year for Big 12: That Texas title at the Big 12 baseball tournament this weekend saved the conference some disconcerting headlines.

As silly as it sounds to pin a darkhorse label on the massively funded, richly talented Longhorns, that was exactly they’re lot entering Tulsa after a season spent underachieving. In the Big 12, they had plenty of company.

The conference that had never sent fewer than three teams to the NCAA regionals was in danger of qualifying only TCU and Oklahoma State this time. Then Texas strung together four-day survival run, captured the conference tourney and snagged the automatic bid it needed. Thus, three teams live on in the postseason, matching the previous low set in 2013.

A year ago, the Big 12 sent five teams to the regionals, four to the super regionals and three to Omaha. So a return to the mean seemed inevitable. Despite TCU and Oklahoma State assembling top-10 teams, the rest of the league bottomed out.

The Big 12 ranked only sixth in conference RPI, behind the Missouri Valley and the AAC (which features three of West Virginia’s former Big East rivals).

The Big 12’s third-highest RPI team was Texas Tech, way down at No. 77, while Oklahoma slipped to No. 84. That Texas team that salvaged its season in Tulsa? It will enter the NCAAs at No. 86.

Keep in mind, the Big 12 has only nine baseball-playing members, so landing three regional bids still speaks to 33-percent representation, though it lags behind other conferences. The SEC, ACC and AAC advanced 50 percent of their teams, and the Pac 12 advanced 54 percent. The Big Ten, despite a frigid footprint that typically dooms college baseball programs, sent a record five teams to the bracket (38 percent).