BLOOMINGTON, Ind. – With Indiana qualifying for the Big Ten Baseball Tournament,, I created a Big Ten baseball tournament tracker for readers to follow along with as the tournament plays out. Shameless plug alert, you can find it here.
Without having consulted the tournament format ahead of time – I’m no different than most in paying little attention to the conference tournament until it is imminent – I had expected to type out the scenarios for a double-elimination format.
Double-elimination has been the standard for college baseball tournaments for a long time. While double-elimination has come under fire because it’s hard to manage a pitching staff if you’re playing more than one game in a day, it’s still the fairest way to decide a sport that produces more unpredictable outcomes than most.
However, the Big Ten has abandoned a double-elimination tournament. With an unwieldy 12 teams in the field, the Big Ten is using a pool play format in 2025.
The winners of all four pools play each other in two single-elimination semifinal games, with the winners advancing to the championship game.
I’ve been around my share of college baseball tournament formats, including ones based on pool play. This just might be the worst I’ve seen. But it’s a symptom of a bigger issue.
Sports like baseball are an afterthought in the consolidation of college conferences into mega conglomerates. The Big Ten now has 17 baseball-playing schools – Wisconsin is the lone school that doesn’t sponsor the sport. You can’t take all 17 teams to the tournament; it’s not logistically possible.
The Big Ten could have kept the eight-team field it used to have, but then more schools would be out of the Big Ten Tournament than in it. That would have satisfied no one.
Besides, there was legitimate fear the West Coast schools would dominate an eight-team field. Sure enough, Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington finished in the top five of the Big Ten in 2025.
Creating a conference tournament format that strikes the right balance between pleasing as many programs as possible while making it competitively credible is a square peg for a round hole – and the bizarro Big Ten format does not come close to fitting.
What was created is a Frankenstein monster trying to please everyone. This tournament has a format that doesn’t help favorites or underdogs.
Indiana is a great example of what’s wrong. Indiana has a No. 62 RPI that has placed it just outside of NCAA Tournament at-large consideration.
In former circumstances, Indiana could make a run at the Big Ten Tournament playing against multiple quality foes to boost their resume. By Friday in the old format, Indiana could have played as many as four or five games if it kept winning.
That opportunity isn’t there for Indiana in this new format. Indiana will play a maximum of four games if it makes it to the championship game. Not exactly a good chance to raise its resume.
So the opportunity for bubble teams to boost their case is diminished because there will be fewer games to play.
Yet this format doesn’t particularly favor the top-seeded teams, either. They have no margin for error. One loss in their pool could see them go home.
It also creates bizarre anomalies like Indiana having to sit in Omaha for two days between its pool games. The Hoosiers play Rutgers at 3 p.m. Tuesday and then cool their heels until they face Iowa at 3 p.m. Friday.
Even with the addition of the West Coast schools, the Big Ten is not one of college baseball’s best leagues. It should have created a format that helped bubble teams make a run and put its best teams in the best chance to earn an at-large bid should they falter in the conference tournament.
The Big Ten still could have had a 12-team field that made sense if it put the single-elimination portion at the start instead of the end. The Big Ten could have had a one-game play-in for seeds 5 to 12 to determine whether they made the final bracket or not. Then it could go double elimination from there in the former format.
The Big Ten did neither, but I doubt anyone up at conference headquarters is losing any sleep over it. After all, sports like baseball are just left to try to pick up the pieces as Division I makes its decisions based largely on the whims of major football and men’s basketball programs. The Big Ten is one of the movers and shakers that have been part of the problem.
They also count on fan apathy in sports like baseball where few besides the participants or diehards of the chosen sport know the difference.
Understand that this format makes zero sense, but it does perfectly reflect a college athletics world that abandoned good sense a long time ago. Big Ten baseball teams just have to deal with the consequences and smile as they go along for the ride.
This post was originally published on this site be sure to check out more of their content.
