As we hit mid-June, the college athletic season is all but over. The College World Series is all that's left, the NCAA's 90th and final championship of 2018-19. However it turns out, two of the teams that made it to Omaha are wrapping up perhaps the best athletic year across the board in school history. Both of them.
Entering this year, Texas Tech had only won one National Championship in school history--the Sheryl Swoopes-led women's basketball team in 1993. The Red Raider men's teams had not only never won a title, they'd never even reached a National Championship Game. Their men's basketball team, outside of that brief period when Bobby Knight was the coach, had been virtually irrelevant on the national scene until reaching the Elite Eight last year.
This season they really broke through, winning their first-ever Big 12 regular season title and making it to the Final Four for the first time. Then they beat Michigan State in the Final Four to advance to their first-ever National Championship Game in any sport. And they came thisclose to winning the title, falling to Virginia in overtime.
Two months later, that National Championship would come. Texas Tech was the dominant team at the NCAA Outdoor Track & Field Championships. The brilliant Divine Oduduru won the 100 and 200, and Eric Kicinski won the discus. They also got a second-place finish in the 400 hurdles and took third in the 4x100 relay. Throw in six other scoring performances and Texas Tech finished with 60 points, 10 more than Florida, to win the school's first-ever men's National Championship.
And now their baseball team is in the College World Series for the second straight season and the fourth time in six years. Texas Tech's previous three trips to Omaha only yielded a total of two wins. But this is a new Texas Tech University athletic program, so I wouldn't be surprised to see them go on a run. Maybe even one that ends with their second National title in a few weeks.
Another school whose baseball team will be playing in Omaha is Auburn. They blew out North Carolina in Game 3 of the Super Regional to reach their first College World Series since 1997. That was so long ago, the NCAA Tournament only had 48 teams then, and there was no Super Regional. Yet here they are, back at the college baseball summit, capping what's really been a phenomenal year for Auburn across the board.
Auburn, of course, has won National Championships before. They've won eight in men's swimming, five (in six years) in women's swimming, and one in women's outdoor track. And there's also the five football National Championships, most recently that brilliant run in 2010, when they went undefeated and Cam Newton won the Heisman.
But that doesn't make the Tigers' 2018-19 any less impressive. And the most impressive part of their 2018-19 athletic year also has to be men's basketball. A program that, like the Texas Tech men's basketball program, didn't really have much history to speak of other than a run to the Elite Eight in the mid-80s when Charles Barkley and Chuck Person were on the team.
Sir Charles is usually a highlight of the NCAA Tournament with his unintelligible analysis that makes sense to only him. This year, he was on a completely different level of awesomeness, though. He was rooting for his alma mater and made no qualms about it. He had an Auburn banner and a stuffed tiger that he kept hugging. It was incredible in so many ways!
Speaking of incredible, the same could be said about the Auburn men's basketball team's season as a whole. All they did during the regular season was nearly beat Kentucky when they were No. 1 and beat Tennessee when they were. Then they beat Tennessee again, in Nashville, by 20, to win their first SEC Tournament title since 1985.
So how does the NCAA Tournament committee reward them? They give them the 5-seed in a region with North Carolina, Kentucky and Kansas. No problem. Auburn beat them all, including an incredible overtime victory over Kentucky in the Elite Eight, which got the Tigers to their first Final Four.
Their Final Four game was even more incredible than the Elite Eight game. Auburn led the entire way and would've advanced to the National Championship Game if not for that foul on the Virginia three-pointer in the waning seconds. Still, it was an incredible run for Bruce Pearl's team, and I don't think it'll be their last.
Neither school is in the Top 10 for the Capital One Cup, which measures overall success for collegiate athletic programs. Virginia, which won the national title in lacrosse to go along with their basketball championship, has the men's cup locked up. But I don't think Texas Tech and Auburn would trade their 2018-19 seasons for anything. And one of them could end it with a College World Series crown.
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