Monday Musings: WKU Just Had It’s Best Baseball Season In A Decade. Too Bad No One Could See It.
No, it isn't your Facebook feed. WKU baseball games just look like that. Here's to hoping that, starting next year, they won't.
I have a confession to make - this past weekend was the first time since WKU’s game at Louisville back in early March that I was able to watch the Hilltoppers on the baseball field. And a good reason for that is how unwatchable the home games were this season.
Big Red’s Reads
News to use regarding WKU, Conference USA and the collegiate athletic landscape as a whole.
Bill Connelly, a smart and good football writer, did not include any of the powerhouse Hilltopper quarterbacks in his ranking of the 75 best college QBs since 2000. ($)
It’s Preseason All-Conference SZN, and Athlon Sports tabbed 15 Hilltoppers to one of its four preseason squads, the most in the conference. Athlon’s full preseason C-USA teams are here.
No real analysis to add here, just enjoy watching Daewood Davis catch this bomb from Tua Tagovailoa at Dolphins OTAs.
Now two-time former Hilltopper Jordan Rawls is staying in conference, heading to New Mexico State. The Aggies are looking for a systematic overhaul of the program after it didn’t finish its season last year due to a myriad of culture issues, from hazing to allegations of at least one player’s involvement in a fatal shooting. Hopefully Rawls can be one of the players that comes in and helps turn things around there.
Last week, we saw what the WKU volleyball schedule had in store. This week, it was the soccer schedule that got released. Xavier (home) and Purdue (away) are maybe the most notable non-conference opponents on the slate, which will end with the conference tournament in Ruston.
They’re not going to be conference champions this year, but make no mistake, this year’s baseball season for the Hilltoppers was an outrageous success. The Tops took down outgoing conference mates FAU, twice, scoring 16 runs in the seventh inning or later in both games before running into the DBU juggernaut that ultimately spelled the end of their run. Sure up the pitching staff and the Tops will be a force next year.
Just how impressive was the turnaround by Marc Rardin this year? WKU Athletic Director Todd Stewart breaks it down.
Oh, Say, Can You See?
For the first time since 2009 - four head coaches ago - the Western Kentucky baseball program won 30 games in one season. It was the definition of a roller coaster year; A 14-4 start was derailed a bit by a 2-10 C-USA start, only for the Tops to end the season winning five of its last six conference series and make some noise at the C-USA tournament in Houston, winning two games in dramatic, come-from-behind fashion.
It was exactly the kind of season the Tops needed to have in year one under Rardin, who has injected life into an otherwise lifeless program almost from the jump.
Unfortunately, unless you were actually able to attend games at Nick Denes Field this past year, you weren’t really able to watch the team the way they deserved to be watched until this past weekend at the NCAA tournament.
Again in 2023, WKU baseball and softball games - two programs that deserve your attention - were available for free on the HSSN Facebook Page.
Free access is good!
But, when the stream looks like this, it’s almost not even worth having a stream.
This is what all nine innings look like from Nick Denes Field. And what it has looked like for at least four years. A static shot, with a scorebug that takes up almost half of the upper right-hand side.
Mind you, Western Kentucky boasts one of the best broadcasting departments in the country. It’s one of the reasons I, personally, attended WKU! And this is the best its esteemed HSSN can come up with?
They also do volleyball and soccer broadcasts (with a moving camera and everything!), and used to produce basketball games for Fox College Sports that looked like real, actual productions! But the little amount of care put in the baseball and softball streams is, frankly, embarrassing.
For comparison’s sake, here’s what baseball broadcasts at two, low-major schools in Kentucky looked like this year.
First, the Northern Kentucky Norse.
Wow! A traditional baseball feed?! Multiple cameras? A scoreboard that isn’t an eyesore?! What a concept.
Next up, the even smaller (in terms of enrollment) Morehead State.
Again, something that resembles an actual baseball broadcast! I almost can’t believe it!
While yes, I will concede both of these are “proper” ESPN+ productions (which, you may be surprised to learn, isn’t a given!), it still should be embarrassing for WKU fans that their product is below that of two non-FBS schools in the same state.
I also will revert to a point I made above, and one I’ve made on Twitter constantly: WKU is a nationally recognized broadcasting university. It’s Syracuse, Arizona State, Missouri, WKU. That’s the list. So it isn’t that a quality-looking baseball broadcast is impossible, it’s simply out of laziness that one wasn’t created.
C-USA’s new media deal kicks in at the start of next year, one that makes ESPN3 and ESPN+ the conference’s exclusive digital home for Olympic sports. This means that it’s possible HSSN will still be the production house behind volleyball, soccer, baseball and softball games with them now airing on one of ESPN’s digital platforms instead of Facebook. This is a net good, as it’ll allow people with those services to stumble on a game and watch WKU.
But it is imperative the quality of the baseball and softball productions improve with the new media deal, especially if the former is going to continue to be a threat to win 30+ games and make the semifinals in the C-USA tournament every year (if not better), and the latter will continue to be a threat to win the league and play in the NCAA tournament every other year or so.
If our Twitter analytics were any indication this weekend, WKU fans are clamoring for a competitive baseball team, and they’ve finally got one. Now, we need to give them a feed that looks like actual care and consideration was put into or no one is going to care outside of for one week of the 60+ game gauntlet that is college baseball.