photo by: Sarah Buchanan/Special to the Journal-World

Kansas' Dariel Osoria is celebrated by his teammates after scoring against BYU on Saturday, May 10, 2025, at Hoglund Ballpark.

Despite a series win last weekend, the Kansas baseball team is no longer within reach of a Big 12 regular-season title. Even if the Jayhawks swept league leader West Virginia this week, in a series that begins Thursday at Kendrick Family Ballpark, and got a lot of other help, the Mountaineers would have a higher league win percentage of .679 to KU’s .667.

However, KU is certainly in the picture for a top-four seed at the Big 12 Championship; in fact, the Jayhawks currently sit in a tie for third.

“We’re super focused on this series,” sophomore pitcher Cooper Moore said on Tuesday. “I know the Big 12 tournament’s coming up, but we got to get some wins this weekend and it would put us in a great spot to go into the tournament and have a good run.”

The top four teams in the Big 12 will get a bye, meaning they won’t have to begin on Wednesday and can start playing on Thursday, May 22. That is an asset in that it reduces a championship run to the duration of a standard three-game series and moves a few select programs one step closer to a Big 12 tournament title.

The Big 12 has implemented a new 12-team single-elimination format this year, of which KU coach Dan Fitzgerald is not necessarily a fan.

“In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever played in a single-elimination anything in baseball,” he said recently. “But it’s a little bit of a standard now … We have a couple factors. One, we have to be done Saturday night with BYU coming into the Big 12, and so it shrinks our week, so that was one factor, and then, you know, just (the) new world of college athletics, cost of everything changes.”

With no margin for error given the abolition of double elimination, the first-round bye would be a great aid to any team. The problem for the Jayhawks’ chances is that before they get to Arlington, Texas, they must face the best team in the league on the road in a week when many other high-level teams have vastly more favorable matchups, and nearly every other team in contention for a top-four spot has a tiebreaker over KU.

The Jayhawks have taken care of business against inferior foes this year — they are 13-2 against teams in the bottom half of the league — but they are 4-9 against their competition for the first-round bye, with a midweek (technically considered nonconference) loss against Arizona and a walk-off defeat in the rubber match at Arizona State looming large. Head-to-head record is the Big 12’s main tiebreaker.

Currently tied for third with TCU, a team that swept the Jayhawks earlier in the year, KU is essentially in line for a No. 4 seed and controls its own destiny, i.e., can clinch a first-round bye if it sweeps the first-place Mountaineers. In any other situation, though, the Jayhawks could get squeezed out of their favorable position.

For instance, if they win two out of three to reach a 19-11 league record but Arizona sweeps Houston to get to the same mark, the Wildcats would apparently have the edge because of that midweek matchup. That would be problematic for KU if TCU simultaneously sweeps its series against last-place Utah to reach 20-10.

There are also some convoluted multi-team tie scenarios, though. If Kansas State were to sweep Cincinnati and enter a tie with KU and UA at 19-11, the tie could not be resolved based on three-way head-to-head win percentage because K-State and Arizona did not play each other.

The tiebreaker would then be based on win percentage against the highest-placed common opponent in the standings, specifically in conference competition. However, in this scenario, all three teams would have 2-1 records against West Virginia. Let’s say ASU and TCU lock up second and third place, respectively: The three-way tie could not be measured against ASU, which KSU did not face, or TCU, which KSU only faced in a preseason nonconference game.

As a result, in this scenario a first-round bye would be awarded, improbably, based on win percentage against the team or teams who end up in seventh place.

With these sorts of permutations possible, KU could end up as high as second place at 20-10 or as low as seventh at 17-13. (There is no way for both Kansas State and Cincinnati to end up ahead of the Jayhawks.)

Tournament positioning

KU is in a good spot for a high No. 3 seed in a given four-team NCAA regional at No. 34, and WarrenNolan.com projects that the Jayhawks would only drop a few spots if they got swept by the Mountaineers. A more favorable result could get them on the No. 2 line as one of the top 32 teams in the country; of course, the Big 12 Championship could still shake things up further.

“It gives us a great opportunity to climb,” Fitzgerald said on Tuesday. “We’re in a great spot with our RPI and it only gives us a chance to go up.”

In its bracket projection released on Monday, The Tennessean placed KU in Austin, Texas, for regional competition hosted by the No. 1 overall seed Longhorns. That is a program against which the Jayhawks have extensive history from their time together in the Big 12, and even some success in years past; however, the Texas program has a new look under head coach Jim Schlossnagle, who took the job after leading Texas A&M to the Men’s College World Series finals.

Also in that prospective regional are No. 2 Duke, which shook off some questionable early-season nonconference results to find success in the ACC, and No. 4 Missouri State, a projected automatic qualifier from the Missouri Valley Conference, which KU beat in extra innings in Fitzgerald’s first year at the helm.

Bracket projections at this point generally have the Jayhawks as one of the top No. 3 seeds, as is consistent with their RPI number. On Wednesday, Baseball America had KU as a No. 3 seed in a regional hosted by No. 14 overall Clemson, along with No. 2 seed Ole Miss and No. 4 Rhode Island.

Of note, one popular projected arrangement in recent weeks has been to place the Jayhawks in Fayetteville, Arkansas, which would of course mean yet another postseason matchup between KU and the school that knocked it out of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in both 2023 and 2025 and beat it in the 2022 Liberty Bowl. D1Baseball, one of the few outlets currently considering KU a No. 2 seed, on Tuesday placed it in Fayetteville with the Razorbacks as well as Western Kentucky and Wright State.

The selection show will take place on Memorial Day, Monday, May 26.

What lies directly ahead

WVU, a frontrunner all year, is coming off something of an aberrant three-game swing at Kansas State in which it blew both a 7-2 ninth-inning lead in the series opener and a 9-7 eighth-inning lead in the closer.

Generally, the Mountaineers have had the best pitching staff in the Big 12 for much of the season, led by Friday night starter Griffin Kirn, a transfer from Division II Quincy University, and go-to reliever Reese Bassinger, who came in from Tarleton State. Bassinger has issued just 10 walks all season in 24 appearances.

Meanwhile, like KU, WVU is balanced on offense. Senior infielder Kyle West is third in the Big 12 in on-base percentage and shares the team lead in home runs, eight, with outfielder Jace Rinehart. Sam White, with a .368 batting average, leads a group of six Mountaineers hitting over .300.

The series begins on Thursday at 5:30 p.m. Central Time.