Pac 10 Sports Blog

Until yesterday, there were three Pac-10 teams still alive in the Super Regional round of the NCAA Baseball Tournament. For those who don’t know, this is the sweet 16 in baseball and the winners of each three game series moves on to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska as one of the final eight teams remaining.

In an upset, Stanford swept Cal-State Fullerton, the fifth overall seed in the tournament and host to their series with Stanford, and are now one of the six teams that have already qualified for the eight team final.

Among the other six teams already in the College World Series is Miami (Fl.), the first overall seed, who had to struggle past a feisty Arizona team that took the first game of the three game series in 11 innings, 6-3. However, Miami, rated no. 1 in the nation at the end of the season in both the USA Today top 25 poll and Baseball America’s top 25, slugged out a win in game two, 14-10, and then finished the wildcats off with a 4-2 win yesterday.

The final Pac-10 team still alive in the tournament is Arizona State, the number three overall seed. Arizona State, also this season’s Pac-10 regular season champions and no. 4 in the nation at season’s end, dropped their second game against an upstart Fresno State team that they crushed in their first meeting. Fresno State is a team that was seeded fourth in their region and for those basketball fans out there, that’s like a 13-16 seed making it to the sweet sixteen. Their series is tied 1-1 heading into tonight’s third and final game with a spot in the college world series on the line.

I’d be surprised if Arizona State doesn’t crush Fresno State tonight because they have been superb throughout the season and have faced stiffer competition than Fresno State.

It’d be nice to see two Pac-10 teams in the college world series since the Pac-10 has been solid in baseball over the past few seasons. The conference got five teams in the tournament this year, and Oregon State had won the previous two tournaments before this one.

In other Pac-10 news, Wrestlers at Oregon filed a law suit on Friday in a court in Salem, Oregon to try and save their sport from being dropped as a Varsity sport in favor of Baseball next year.

According to an article on ESPN.com, the complaint filed was that the university mistakenly interpreted Title IX requirements when they dropped wrestling, a male sport.

Title IX is a little tricky in that universities can choose to either have an equal amount of varsity teams between men’s and women’s sports or equal scholarships for men and women athletes. I believe that the University of Oregon adheres to the former set of rules and so they needed to drop a men’s sport when they added baseball in order to still have a balanced amount of men’s and women’s teams. Also, the University is not completely balanced as of right now, so any change in terms of varsity athletics has to be seen as a move towards gender equality at the university. Otherwise they could face severe punishments from many more organizations much scarier than a handful of meaty wrestlers.

Personally, I live in Eugene and I think the wrestlers should just drop it. Nobody goes to wrestling and no one paid attention to it until it was dropped, at which point all the bleeding hearts in Eugene (and there are many) began singing wrestling’s praises.

The fact of the matter is that Baseball is better for the whole community. It will bring more money in and it allows the Eugene Emeralds to stay in the city when before the announcement, they were thinking about moving somewhere else in Oregon, where they could build their own new stadium.

Recently, this wrestling move (no pun intended) has been compared next to Arizona State’s move to drop wrestling to supposedly save money. However the two situations, like most sports comparisons, are too different to compare.

If any of you readers have more comments on this or other Pac-10 related stories, please comment on this post. Sports discussions are always the best way to receive sports news.