Monday, June 25, 2007

Shouldn't Oregon State's CWS victory be considered a huge upset?

Maybe it's a good thing that Oregon State won its second straight College World Series title. We get to say Beaver a lot more than usual today. Beaver. Hehe.

After beating North Carolina for the second-straight year in Omaha ('Heels/Beav a new baseball rivalry?), most folks who are actually talking about this (over/under set at six people) are mentioning the whole repeat factor.

And while that's good and cool and neat and spiffy, there's a bigger deal to be made of this. Oregon State winning the College World Series seems, to us, a big fucking upset.

The Beavers are the first team in like the history of college and baseball to win a CWS crown after having a losing record in conference. OSU was 10-14 in the Pac-10 and tied for sixth. The Beav also lost six of eight position players and two thirds of its pitching rotation from last year's championship squad.

That's crazy. Oregon State coach Pat Casey would agree.

"It's crazy. It's just crazy," he said.

Yeah. Crazy.

Crazier is that the Beavers won the damn thing as a No. 3 seed, which is about the equivalent of a No. 9 or 10 seed winning March Madness. Villanova, as a No. 8 in 1985, is still the lowest seed to win the Dance.

Sure, OSU's been here before and all that shit, but c'mon, this team wasn't expected to make it past the first round.

We tend to get a bit preachy when it comes to college baseball, but it's a fun game, good end-of-the-year tournament and now we have a dynasty (sorta) to talk about. So hail the Oregon State Beavers, who, undoubtedly, will be pulling beaver for the next few days.

3 comments:

THN said...

I mentioned today that the balance of power in the West has shifted from Fullerton to Corvallis. But what OSU did was nothing short of amazing. What a great run.

rstiles said...

Plus, the Beavers lost many starting players from last year's team....it was an upset for them to win it all

The Beautiful Game said...

ummm, widgets? is this the jetsons or something?

only in baseball (or the Eastern Conference) can teams with a record like 10-14 in league have a chance at the title...

i'm fairly certain, OSU players were on the juice in the CWS

no juice in the regular season...

just the CWS

juice