Connon: UCLA Baseball's Wild Pac-12 Tournament Epitomizes Flaws in System
The first-ever Pac-12 Baseball Tournament is coming to a close Sunday afternoon, wrapping up a week of some of the most chaotic, memorable competition in the sport.
And none of it should have happened.
UCLA baseball was at the center of all that chaos, becoming the poster child for the insanity that took place in Scottsdale, Arizona. The Bruins opened things up Wednesday with a game against Cal that started at 10:15 p.m. and ended at 1:26 a.m., then had to play another game less than 12 hours later against Washington.
After winning that contest to stay in the hunt, UCLA returned to rematch Cal and won that second showdown in extra innings. The Bruins' next game was surely their most memorable, as they came back from down nine runs in the bottom of the ninth to force extra innings and eventually beat Oregon State 25-22.
That win forced a doubleheader, and although UCLA came back to take another late lead, Oregon State ultimately walked off to advance to the championship game on Sunday.
Despite all the drama, intrigue and viral moments, what stood out most was that the baseball being played was far from world-class, and the whole ordeal felt like an afterthought.
The Bruins' bats were virtually silenced in the overnight opener against the Golden Bears, and then they went on to score 55 runs over the next four games against inferior and/or gassed opposing staffs. UCLA's pitchers, on the other hand, allowed 49 runs over the course of the week – good for nearly 10 per game.
Injuries surely played a part in the Bruins' inability to hold opponents off the scoreboard – Max Rajcic, Thatcher Hurd, Gage Jump, Jared Karros and Jake Brooks were all out, robbing coach John Savage of his top-five starting pitchers – but it was an issue virtually every team faced. Freshman shortstop Cody Schrier and freshman outfielder Malakhi Knight were also absent, putting the blue and gold down two of their future stars.
Many of the key contributors on the mound and at the plate were players who had hardly appeared, if at all, this season, and UCLA still managed to make it a few outs from playing in the title game regardless. That's all well and good, and certainly cause for optimism heading into NCAA Regionals, but in terms of the tangible value the tournament provided, the pros didn't seem to outweigh the cons.
Reports of the Pac-12 adding a conference tournament first surfaced several years ago, but it wasn't official until summer 2021. The first rendition of the affair was messy, from the one-field system leading to countless delayed start times to the climate in Scottsdale resulting in game-time temperatures that hit 100 degrees.
The average reported attendance for UCLA's five games was 2,688, but on TV, the stands looked far emptier than that. Scottsdale Stadium sits 12,000, and not one game came close to approaching that level of attendance.
Airing all the games on Pac-12 Networks also limited the viewership from afar, with large swaths of the country and even the West Coast notoriously unable to subscribe to the channel. Even if they had access to it, the ratings for games taking place after midnight couldn't have been great anyways.
Forcing these games to be played at absurd times with insultingly short rest periods made it feel like the conference was just checking boxes to get through the weekend. Things are bound to be messy on the first time around, but it was a flawed system from the start.
Pac-12 commissioner George Kliavkoff took pride in the poor pitching, abundance of runs and overuse of players ahead of Sunday's championship game, and someone could spin his same exact stats to build an argument that the event was a failure.
It's too late for the Pac-12 to turn back now – the cat is out of the bag, Pandora's Box has been opened, and so on and so forth. To be completely honest, the conference didn't have much of a choice to begin with, considering every other power conference and even most mid-majors had already installed tournaments long before them.
From financial and general relevance standpoints, the Pac-12 was – per usual – getting left in the dust. It just so happened that in their pursuit of playing catch up, they stumbled head first into one of the most flawed, pointless systems in college sports.
All of this just to switch up a few automatic bids, and supposedly improve power conference teams' RPI. Well, the Bruins did go from 51 to 46 after their five games, but playing a three-game series against a single conference opponent could have led to the same result.
The NCAA and its conferences started these tournaments as an extra revenue stream, but until the exact numbers come out for the Pac-12, the jury is still out on whether or not they successfully created one. That mindless pursuit of profit is not good for the players, the coaches or the quality of the games being played, and while it may result in a few sparks of relevance over the weekend, it does not seem worth it overall. There's a reason coach John Savage has gone on the record against the idea several times in the past.
While removing these conference tournaments is next to impossible, changing the format is the least the higher-ups and administrators can do. Instead of eight teams in the bracket, perhaps six; consider ditching double-elimination; maybe pick a city with two nearby stadiums to ease scheduling concerns and delays, or one that isn't known for blistering heat.
In an ideal world, there aren't any conference tournaments, but since that isn't going to happen anytime soon, it's up to Kliavkoff and his peers to put their heads together and come up with a better version moving forward.
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