As we start building an archive on Rose Bowl Friday, we can pause here today to examine the history of the College World Series as it relates to the Pacific-12 Conference … aka, the Conference of (real NCAA) Champions. As this year’s event gets under way for the final season including the Pac-12 as we know it, we have to point out the obvious: the Conference of Champions has the most College World Series titles ever.

Duh.

Sometimes we wonder if this wasn’t some conspiracy to break up the Conference of Champions out of petty jealousy, although obviously a lot of it had to do with TV revenue for college football alone. The Pac-8/10/12 has dominated college sports for so long in terms of sanctioned NCAA titles that it had to grate on the nerves of those bitterpants folks in the Southeastern Conference. We know it did in football, at least.

Yet we digress: With 18 college baseball championships, the Pac-12 will “retire” as the all-time leader, no matter what happens in this year’s tournament. The SEC is second with 15 titles, and before that conference’s corrupt push of the last two decades (or more), the gap was even wider: by the end of the twentieth century, the then Pac-12 Conference had 13 titles—and the SEC just 5 titles. Suspect, huh?

Piling it on, really, teams in the current Conference of Champions have even more titles going back to the first CWS in 1947, which was won by … you guessed it, a Pac-12 school: California. If we add up the titles before the formation of the conference as we know it today (1964), the Conference of Champions actually has 22 championships. The current membership overall? That’s 27 titles for the 12 member schools. Wow!

Yes, USC leads the way with 12 titles overall, and that certainly boosts the conference’s status, but 7 different teams in the 12-team conference have won baseball championships: USC, Arizona State, Arizona, Oregon State, Stanford, California, and UCLA. All this will come to an end, with 10 of the conference’s schools bolting and leaving the Beavers and the Washington State Cougars behind in a “Pac-2” for now … pending.

What are the prospects for 2024 and the Pac-12’s final display in the College World Series? Arizona (ranked No. 18), Oregon (23), and Oregon State (No. 6) are the entrants, with the Wildcats and Beavers hosting regionals as the top seeds. Oddly, Oregon State may have to play No. 2 Kentucky in a super regional in order to get to Omaha for the 8-team finals. That doesn’t seem to be equitable or fair, does it? Typical $EC garbage.

Meanwhile, Arizona’s pathway to Omaha leads through No. 7 North Carolina, while the Ducks face the toughest journey: No. 13 UC Santa Barbara and No. 4 Texas A&M. Thus, no Pac-12 team would be “favored” to make it to the College World Series finals, but it’s baseball: anything can happen. We saw that in 2019 when the Michigan Wolverines emerged from the Corvallis regional as the No. 3 seed and almost won it all.

Our hopes are with the Beavers, the Wildcats, and the Ducks as they carry the Pac-12 flag into the sunset.