Quote Originally Posted by Quaoarsking View Post
Leave it to our own fans to try to downplay and belittle our last few decades of success. I looked up the final Baseball America rankings from 1990 through 2023
  • I chose 1990 to stay consistent with the OP.
  • I chose Baseball America because they've had a final ranking each year, and they don't go exactly by the postseason. Postseason matters in the final poll, but so does regular season. If you make Omaha, you'll be high, but not automatically in the top 8.


Here's the top 25 counting each final poll as a ballot (so being #1 gets you 25 points, on down):

495 1 LSU
489 2 Florida State
431 3 Stanford
415 4 Cal State Fullerton
405 5 Texas
396 6 Miami
353 7 Florida
283 8 Clemson
275 9 Rice
274 10 Arizona State
267 11 South Carolina
241 12 North Carolina
233 13 Texas A&M
229 14 USC
225 15 Arkansas
223 16 Mississippi State
222 17 Oklahoma State
213 18 Vanderbilt
209 19 Virginia
193 20 Oregon State
192 21 Georgia Tech
185 22 TCU
179 23 Oklahoma
172 24 Wichita State
167 25 Louisville

So we're #16 and #6 in the SEC. That's very solid, but not really elite.

But it greatly varies on where you set the boundaries.
  • If you start it in 1985 rather than 1990, we're #13.
  • If you start it in 1999 (to line up with the 64-team NCAA bracket), we're #16
  • If you start it in 2013 (so the last 10 seasons) we're #7 (despite getting 0 points the last 2 years)
  • From 2013 through 2021 we were #2, only behind Vanderbilt.


The verdict is that we are a very good program historically, but not really elite until the 2010s thanks to Cohen and his successors. Hopefully the last 2 years are a blip and we start climbing up the leaderboards again this season.
College baseball in the South was very different than it is now prior to 1977. We had some teams that won the SEC in the 40's and 60's that didn't go to regionals and in the late 60's we couldn't play some of our upperclass players because of rules- I think we had players that were married or something the NCAA didn't like.

For the South region we've been elite almost since our program began. It's just didn't go national until the 1980's. Same for LSU. And then the other programs followed behind.