Analyzing Which Teams Are Most Affected By The Return Of The 2020 Senior Class

The NCAA’s Division I Council last week granted all spring sports student-athletes an extra year of eligibility to account for the cancellation of the 2020 season due to the coronavirus pandemic.

Among the many effects of that ruling—as well as MLB’s decision to hold a drastically shortened draft, perhaps as few as five rounds—is that many college baseball rosters will be facing a crunch next year. The Council exempted returning seniors from college baseball’s roster caps—a maximum of 35 players on the roster, 27 of whom can be on scholarship and a maximum of 11.7 scholarships—but there are still only nine players on the diamond and 27 spots on a travel roster.

It’s too early to know just how many more players there will be in college baseball next year due to numerous factors ranging from the draft to graduate school plans to the financial costs of playing another year of baseball, a partial scholarship sport.

But while players around the country mull those questions, we can analyze which schools will face the biggest crunch from a few of the factors in play—returning seniors, fewer juniors getting drafted and fewer prep players entering pro ball.

Because the NCAA ruled that only players who were set to exhaust their eligibility in 2020 will be exempt from the roster caps this study is focused on those players. Many redshirt juniors will also have tough decisions to make, as they also are likely approaching graduation or were expecting to be in the mix to get drafted. But, for these purposes, the focus is on players who this spring were true or redshirt seniors.

This analysis includes every team that plays in a conference that ranked in the top 15 of this season’s conference RPI, according to WarrenNolan.com. With 31 baseball-playing conferences in Division I, that roughly approximates the top half of the sport. The teams that make up these 15 conferences (American, ACC, Big 12, Big East, Big Ten, Big West, CAA, Conference USA, Missouri Valley, Pac-12, SEC, Southern, Southland, Sun Belt and West Coast) total 159 teams, more than half of the 301 Division I teams.

The teams in those 15 conferences had a total of 1,038 seniors on their rosters, for an average of 6.53 per team. Approximately a fifth of the players in those conferences are seniors.

At the high end, Louisiana-Monroe and Santa Clara both had 15 seniors on their roster, tied for the most seniors among the teams in the 15 conferences. It won’t come as a surprise to many in college baseball that both ULM and Santa Clara were off to better than normal 12-5 starts. It has long been held in college baseball that teams outside the traditional power structure are at their most competitive when they are older and more experienced than their opponents.