Baseball is rewriting what “favorite” means in the College World Series, with first-timers, double-elimination upsets, and transfer-portal roster churn all combining to produce one repeat team in three years.
For weeks, college sports have leaned on the familiar script: stacked rosters, clear favorites, and postseason brackets that mostly reward teams with the deepest benches.
College baseball’s path to Omaha keeps breaking that script.
Over the past three College World Series, just one team—No. 5 North Carolina—has made repeat trips. That’s the clearest sign that the sport has not merely changed; it’s become harder to predict in ways that don’t match what fans expect from a market increasingly shaped by money. NIL and the transfer portal.
“I think that’s what makes baseball so awesome,” North Carolina coach Steve Forbes said.
The CWS field itself underlines the shakeup. In the past three years, 23 unique teams have filled 24 possible College World Series spots. Eleven different programs from the SEC reached Omaha during that span, with the SEC now standing as the nation’s top conference.
Baseball’s unpredictability isn’t an accident of scheduling or branding. It’s built into the matchups—dozens of them—where a skill gap can be narrowed, and a single break can flip a series.
College baseball’s volatility is different from football and basketball
Football and basketball have their own stars and their own chaos, but baseball’s volatility comes from the way outcomes are formed, inning by inning.
There are set numbers of innings and outs, and a team leading late can’t run out the clock or grind through possessions in the same way it does in other sports. The bigger volatility comes from how baseball is played.
ESPN college baseball analyst Chris Burke describes it as fundamentally skill-driven—where size and physical strength help, but don’t automatically translate into results.
“The sport in and of itself lends itself to unpredictability, more upsets,” Burke said. “College baseball is a sport where you don’t get to put your hands on your opponent. like you do in football or basketball. So it becomes almost entirely a skill sport. And as we know in baseball, that skill can come in a lot of different shapes and sizes.”.
That matters in a sport where the roster advantages often look similar on paper, especially as more teams rely on the transfer portal and expanded spending on personnel.
This year’s field includes two first-time participants: No. 16 seed West Virginia and unseeded Troy. Troy is a Mississippi team that finished ninth in the loaded SEC, while Oklahoma landed in the College World Series after finishing below .500 in SEC play.
The numbers don’t point to a postseason dominated by tradition. They point to a postseason where the “better” team can be interrupted by variance and momentum.
For Troy coach Skylar Meade, the lesson is plain: baseball isn’t a sport where brute force can reliably carry you.
“It’s just really tough in baseball,” Meade said. “You can have so much depth and so much talent. but unlike football. where you can just out-strong somebody. or basketball. where you can just have a guy that’s like. ‘Hey. I’m giving the ball to MJ.’ It’s just different in our sport. But beautiful things do happen where unpredictability prevails.”.
The double-elimination structure turns early losses into turning points
Baseball’s postseason is not a one-and-done sprint.
Football and basketball postseasons follow a one-and-done format, but college baseball’s double-elimination tournament changes the math. Teams get a second chance—and that changes strategy, risk-taking, and momentum.
The case of Troy shows how quickly the tournament can swing. As the No. 3 seed in the Gainesville regional, Troy lost its opener to No. 2 Miami (Fla.) and looked headed toward elimination against No. 4 Rider.
Then the Trojans did the one thing a double-elimination bracket makes possible: they bounced back.
Troy pounded out a 15-7 win, took the rematch against the Hurricanes, won two in a row against host Florida, and then swept Arkansas-Little Rock to reach the CWS.
Oklahoma’s path showed a different kind of desperation—and the same kind of surge.
Oklahoma faced elimination after losing to No. 2 Georgia Tech on May 30. But it responded by topping Georgia Tech on a walk-off home run in the regional elimination game. From there, Oklahoma won two straight over No. 15 Kansas in the Lawrence super regional.
Burke said the format is designed for exactly this kind of swing.
“I do think the double-elimination format allows teams to kind of get hot, so to speak,” Burke said. “You can build this sort off short-term momentum.”
Transfer portal churn and roster depth may be widening parity, not shrinking it
The transfer portal has reshaped college athletics across sports, and baseball is no exception.
Burke estimated that there may be “20 or 30 programs with major NIL funding,” but he said every Division I program still leans heavily on the transfer portal to build rosters.
What stands out, though, is that baseball’s outcomes over the last three years—where only North Carolina has repeated—suggest the portal has had a more transformative effect here than in other major NCAA sports.
One reason may be scale. Baseball has far more teams and players. In Division I, there are 301 teams carrying a maximum of 34 players each, and that creates a huge pool for coaches to evaluate.
Beyond that, there is upward mobility for Division II, Division III, and even junior college prospects to reach the highest level of competition.
“That’s a lot of players for coaches to try and evaluate and fill their rosters for,” Burke said.
For Forbes, the portal isn’t just about acquiring more talent—it’s about flexibility and keeping rosters responsive.
“It’s totally a spread. I just think it allows for coaching staffs to be way more creative with the way they build their rosters than the traditional ‘sign high schools kids and hope they grow up quickly’ model.”
Forbes also said the portal can help programs stay older and more physical by replenishing depth with experienced upperclassmen.
“And that edge isn’t solely for major-conference teams,” he added. “The same advantage exists for the mid-major programs such as Troy, which has more than three times as many seniors, 16, as freshmen, five.”
That matters because mid-majors and Power Four teams may not be separated by ability the way they are in fans’ assumptions about money.
“So just because you’re a Power Four team doesn’t mean that you can’t lose to a mid-major,” Forbes said. “They’re also active on the transfer portal, they’re also active in the high schools.”
He dismissed the idea that money automatically creates a widening gap.
“I think it’s going to remain like that. I don’t think the gap is going to be gigantic just because of ‘money.’ I think a lot of people think that’s going to be the case, but we saw that this year, that’s not the case.”
The broader shift in college sports has been fast—transfer portal, increased spending and roster strategies that look more professional every year.
But Omaha’s field, shaped by double-elimination and the sport’s skill-based volatility, keeps telling a stubborn story: parity isn’t just surviving in college baseball. It’s thriving.
College World Series parity in college baseball transfer portal NIL Steve Forbes Chris Burke Skylar Meade North Carolina West Virginia Troy Oklahoma SEC