Savage Has 'High Hopes' For Future of Big Ten Baseball

Days after UCLA was eliminated from an improbable College World Series run, the Bruins not only set the standard for west coast baseball along with the other former Pac-12 teams that made postseason runs, they set the baseline for Big Ten baseball moving forward.

The Bruins were one of four Big Ten teams to make it to the NCAA Tournament and were the only ones to advance to the super regional round and eventually Omaha.

Being at the forefront of the future of baseball in the conference, coach John Savage gave his perspective on the outlook of what success in the conference looks like in the future. His main suggestion and overarching theme was scheduling and bolstering each team's Rating Percentage Index (RPI).

"I think everybody just has to schedule better," Savage said following UCLA's 7-3 loss to Arkansas on Tuesday, eliminating them from the postseason. "At the end of the day, [the conference] has the chance to have a really good RPI because a lot of the Big Ten teams from the other part of the country have to play a lot of road games, so their RPI does get pretty good.

RPI is college baseball's metric used to determine a team's bid into the postseason which is ultimately based on a program's strength of schedule and overall performance for the season. It ultimately allows the NCAA baseball selection committee to make decisions on who makes the tournament and who doesn't.

"There were some really good teams," Savage added. "Indiana was good, Penn State was good, Iowa was good, clearly Oregon was good, and USC was very good. It's hard. It's hard to get into the tournament the way it's set up. But I just think us coaches have to get together and make sure we build these schedules out to where everybody's RPI is relatively high."

At the end of the regular season, the Big Ten had just three teams with top-50 RPI in Division-I baseball. UCLA was 15th, Oregon was 16th and USC was 45th with Nebraska just missing the cut at 51st.

"You gotta win games," Savage said. "You can build a schedule, but you gotta win games. I think you have to play the right people in the right spots. So I think it's gonna take the whole conference to get together to make sure that people are doing their part to build their RPI and to build their schedule outside of conference.

"I have extremely high hopes for the Big Ten... Like I've said several times, I think it has the chance to have a real good future in baseball."