Why Oklahoma, Texas will further establish SEC as college baseball's dominant league

As of July 1, SEC baseball is becoming even bigger.

Oklahoma and Texas joined the conference, and while the fanfare was biggest in football, the expansion has significant impacts in baseball as well.

Both the Sooners and Longhorns have a rich baseball history. Texas has the most College World Series appearances of any team, with 38, and its six national titles are third behind USC and LSU. Oklahoma has 11 College World Series appearances, tied for fifth in the SEC, and two titles. Both teams now join a conference that has produced the past five national champions and six of the past seven.

The SEC already has made scheduling changes, dropping divisions in favor of two permanent opponents for each team. Beginning in 2025, the SEC tournament will include all 16 teams in a single-elimination format, rather than 12 teams in a modified double-elimination as was the case previously.

Here's how the two new additions will impact SEC baseball:

The SEC will further its claim as the best conference

Of the 16 teams in the SEC, 12 have made it to Omaha in at least one of the past four seasons. Only Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina and Missouri have not, and Missouri is the only team that has not made it to super regionals since 2021.

At the same time, 11 of the 16 teams have missed at least one of the past five NCAA tournaments, with the only exceptions being Vanderbilt (18 straight), Florida (16 straight), LSU (12 straight), Arkansas (seven straight) and Tennessee (five straight).

Parity within the league is high. The past six SEC national champions have been different schools. Ten of the 16 have won at least one national title, and all 16 have made at least one trip to Omaha. With the Sooners and Longhorns each making recent Omaha runs, the race for postseason position will become even tougher.

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How many SEC teams can make the postseason?

In the 14-team SEC, teams generally had to win at least 13 SEC games to get in the postseason. In 2024, all 11 teams that met that mark were given bids.

The SEC tournament expansion opens the door to the league getting even more bids. Eleven was already a record − but Oklahoma and Texas both made regionals, too. Would the SEC have gotten 13 bids in a 2024 version of the super SEC?

It's also worth wondering whether 13 wins will still be the standard. League schedules will become more unbalanced, with each team facing just two-thirds of the other teams in the SEC per year. It's not a guarantee, but it's also not hard to see the committee considering a team that finished with 11 or 12 SEC wins, especially if that team played a more difficult schedule than its conference-mates.

Even spicier rivalries

The SEC already has some great baseball rivalries, including Mississippi State/Ole Miss and Vanderbilt/Tennessee. Oklahoma and Texas will join as rivals in their own right, but the recent Jim Schlossnagle saga should up the ante even more. The Longhorns plucked Schlossnagle from College Station just one day after Texas A&M competed in the College World Series finals, and there's plenty of bad blood on both sides.

Salaries pace the field

SEC baseball coaches are paid much higher than coaches in any other conference. For the 2024 season, five of the 14 SEC coaches were paid at least $1.5 million and nine were paid at least $1 million. That number will go up. South Carolina hired Paul Mainieri in the offseason to a $1.3 million salary after previously paying Mark Kingston just under $700,000.

Georgia's Wes Johnson and Oklahoma's Skip Johnson both recently received extensions, and Wes Johnson's extension increased his salary to $1 million. It is also not yet known what Skip Johnson's new salary is, nor is it known how much Schlossnagle will make at Texas (he was paid $1.46 million at Texas A&M) or what the Aggies will pay new coach Michael Earley.

Higher talent concentration

Part of why the SEC is so dominant is the sheer amount of talent the league's schools accumulate. According to Perfect Game, 14 of the 16 SEC schools have a top-25 recruiting class for 2024, with SEC teams occupying six of the top 10 spots.

According to 64Analytics, which ranks every player in the transfer portal based on a statistical formula, 28 of the top 50 transfers who have committed to a Division I school as of June 30 committed to an SEC school.

This doesn't come at the expense of SEC schools losing their top players, either. Just 17 of the top 250 transfer portal players ranked by 64Analytics are leaving SEC schools, and five of those players are from Texas A&M and could end up returning with Earley's hire.

Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at agerson@gannett.com or on Twitter @aria_gerson.