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Oregon State head coach Mitch Canham (Photo by Eddie Kelly / ProLook Photos)
When Mitch Canham took over Oregon State’s baseball program in the summer of 2019, he knew the road ahead wouldn’t be easy.
The Beavers were one of the nation’s premier programs, and falling even a little short of the resulting expectations, he said, “was never an option.”
But Canham didn’t expect it to be quite this complicated, either.
The former Beaver star-turned-head coach has weathered a storm of adversity since taking the reins, opening his tenure with the chaos of the Covid-19 pandemic and navigating the lingering effects of that disruption.
Five years later, Canham believes he has encountered his greatest obstacle yet.
This latest hurdle—the loss of the school’s longstanding conference home—stands as the most significant test of his young coaching career, one that demands both resilience and reinvention as he steers the Beavers into an uncertain future.
With the Pac-12 Conference crumbling under the weight of conference realignment, and the Beavers left holding the pieces of a once-proud league, Canham was faced with a daunting question:
“There was a lot of uncertainty,” Canham said. “We just immediately started weighing all of our options and thinking about what the absolute best move for Oregon State would be.”
With their conference affiliation in flux, the Beavers’ options seemed both wide open and perilously narrow.
One route was to try to squeeze into an already-crowded conference, a solution that would have offered stability, even if it were only a temporary fix.
Several leagues, notably the Big 12 and Atlantic Coast conferences, were adding schools in the wake of the Pac-12’s unraveling, and Oregon State was certainly an attractive option for any conference looking to solidify its athletic profile, especially on the diamond.
Joining an existing conference would have granted the Beavers some degree of continuity, too, because it would have come with a more familiar schedule layout and potentially an easier path to the postseason.
However, that route also meant sacrificing a level of autonomy. For Canham, the lure of keeping Oregon State’s baseball program independent and free from the political and logistical constraints of conference affiliation was too strong to ignore.
Rather than scramble for a place in a shifting landscape, Canham and Oregon State had an opportunity to set their own way forward.
“I really started to realize quickly that not having any conference affiliation could be great for this baseball program, at least for now,” Canham said. “I just remember thinking to myself, ‘Man, we have an opportunity to go challenge anybody.’ ”
Independence was a rarer and far more daunting path—one that only a handful of schools had pursued in recent decades, with limited success. For Canham, it meant stepping directly into a situation with high risks and even higher rewards.
Independence would demand an incredibly difficult schedule—one that could rival the Power Four conferences in terms of competition. Without the safety net of a conference schedule, Oregon State would have to secure matchups with some of the nation’s elite programs, which is no easy task when most schools have long-term conference ties.
The scheduling challenge alone could cripple a team’s postseason chances, because the NCAA Selection Committee heavily weighs conference strength when making tournament decisions. It was a gamble.
Still, independence had its undeniable appeal, especially from Canham’s perspective. A schedule free from conference constraints gave Oregon State a rare opportunity to showcase its talents on a national stage, to make a statement that it could compete with the best, without relying on the built-in advantages that come with affiliation.
Canham saw the move as a way to galvanize his players, not just to win, but to elevate the program in ways that went beyond. A successful independent season, with the right mix of marquee matchups and impressive victories, could leave no doubt in the minds of the NCAA Selection Committee, and perhaps the broader college baseball world, that Oregon State was still a program to reckon with even in its new era.
Canham understood that Oregon State had always been a team that prided itself on resilience, its ability to overcome the odds and build something bigger than just the sum of its parts. By choosing independence, the Beavers would be leaning into that spirit.
“As time went on, we just realized that it was absolutely the right way forward for us,” Canham recalled. “We’d build in tough opponents, we’d travel a lot, and we’d just show the world that it wouldn’t slow us down one bit. That’s why we picked independence.”
The track record for teams that have made similar decisions is spotty at best, despite there being dozens who tried the path.
Since 1990, just three independent programs—Miami, Dallas Baptist and Cal State Northridge—have even reached the NCAA Tournament, with Miami and Dallas Baptist the only ones to reach a super regional or further.
The Hurricanes have become the standard in that regard. They are the only program to secure multiple national championships as an independent, which they did in 1982, 1985, 1999 and 2001. Head coach Jim Morris, who led Miami’s title winners in 1999 and 2001, said the route is ideal for programs built to handle it.
“I knew every year that we were going to play exactly who I wanted to play,” Morris told Baseball America. “There was never a season when we were independent that I wasn’t happy with our schedule, because myself and my staff put together every piece of it from the first game to the last.
“Do you know what kind of advantage that is? It’s huge.”
Morris, who finished his coaching career with two national championships and a dominant 1,590-715-4 record, said he wouldn’t be surprised if Oregon State experienced similar success in the model he once mastered.
“That’s a historic program that’s won multiple titles in the last few decades,” Morris said. “(Former Oregon State head coach) Pat Casey is an all-time great, and (Canham) got to play for him and won back-to-back titles in 2006 and 2007. If there’s a coach who’s ready for the challenges of going independent, I’m sure he’s one of them.”
Things will look markedly different for the Beavers this season. Canham admitted that it could come with growing pains and adjustments.
Oregon State will spend the first three weeks of its season on the road participating in three consecutive early-season tournaments with a list of opponents that includes Indiana, Virginia, Oklahoma and Auburn, among others.
The Beavers will then embark on what would have typically been a conference schedule, only this year that stretch features teams who were “willing to accept the challenge,” according to Canham.
Oregon State will face four teams—San Diego, Nebraska, UC Irvine and Oregon—that finished the 2024 season ranked among the top 50 in RPI.
A strong win total should still be enough to propel Oregon State into the postseason.
“We got to go out and kind of ask basically anyone in the country, ‘Who wants to play?’ ” Canham said. “The difficulty with that is when you’re trying to find out who has bye weeks, you have to find good competition, and you also need to find who might want to be on the road up in Corvallis, Oregon.
“A lot of people want to stay home in their bye weeks, which can create issues for an independent, but this year we have a handful more road games than before, and we put something together that we and our fanbase should hopefully be proud of.”
Echoed Morris: “The most important thing an independent program can do is be very flexible. We always used to say that we’ll go anywhere and host anyone, and I think that’s what made us so good at the time. It’s a different era of college sports now, but I think Oregon State probably views it all the same way. They’re going to face good teams and be just fine.”
Oregon State’s move to independence mirrors a larger dilemma unfolding across the country. As conference realignment reshapes the sport, the future of college athletics itself remains hazy.
Even Oregon State, in its newfound freedom, has no clear picture of what lies beyond this season. The Beavers, much like the broader college sports landscape, are finding that navigating this brave new world requires more than just grit—it demands a willingness to embrace uncertainty.
The Beavers have certainly done that much.
“I look at this as an opportunity to do something new,” Canham said. “When someone gets banged up or something bad happens, it’s kind of ingrained in me to be like, ‘How lucky are you?’ When there’s some kind of obstacle in front of us, we just know to reframe it. We get to navigate this space. We get to show that we can overcome what others perceive as adversity.
“We’re excited for that chance.”
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