The Seven College Baseball Teams You Need To Know in 2026

If you’re not already into college baseball, I’ll give you the briefest possible form of my annual elevator pitch. It comes in three parts. First: The regional round of the NCAA Tournament isn’t for another four months, but it’s one of the best weekends of TV in all of sports. That’s true even if you drop in cold, but it’s better if you know some of the characters involved. The time to start one’s homework is now.

Second: If you watch college baseball, you can have opinions about the draft that’ll make you look smart in front of your friends. If you’re wrong, no one will remember who you were even talking about, but if you’re right, you can dine out on that prediction forever.

Third: What are you going to do, watch spring training? Davy Andrews wrote last week about a blurry photo of a white guy with a goatee in a blue uniform. He says that was Nolan McLean, but for all I know, it was Civil War General Daniel Sickles. You can watch meaningful regular season baseball tomorrow, or you can delude yourself into thinking there’s anything to be learned from watching Carlos Correa get walked by a minor league pitcher with a uniform number in the 80s.

An actual exhaustive college baseball preview takes months of research and dozens of articles, even for specialist publications that can devote a full staff to the undertaking. Me? I’m one guy with about 3,000 words to play with, so I’m giving you a brief rundown of seven teams I’m interested in. These seven teams include national championship contenders — specifically the two heavy preseason College World Series favorites — but this is not a ranking. I tried to pick good, talented teams from a few conferences that could end up having interesting seasons. Make of it what you will.

Coastal Carolina
Best known outside the baseball world for its teal football field and proximity to Myrtle Beach (for better or worse), Coastal is a college baseball powerhouse. The Chanticleers are the last non-power-conference team to win the College World Series, and they almost added a second title in 2025, losing to LSU in the CWS final.

It could’ve been a transition year under first-year head coach Kevin Schnall; previous head coach Gary Gilmore had spent 29 years in situ, including that national championship year of 2016. But Schnall, his successor, had spent 26 of the previous 30 seasons in Conway as either a player or assistant coach. In his first season at the helm, Schnall’s kids went 56-13 overall and 26-4 in the Sun Belt, and at one point reeled off 26 wins in a row. That 56-win total blew away the previous record for wins by a rookie head coach, and Schnall took home more coach of the year awards than he can fit in his trophy cabinet.

The Chants lost Caden Bodine, winner of the Buster Posey Award as the top catcher in college baseball, to the draft, along with weekend starters Jacob Morrison and Riley Eikhoff. But three of four starting infielders return, along with ace Cameron Flukey and not one but three relievers who made the NCBWA’s Stopper of the Year watchlist. Pitching coach Matt Williams led the Chanticleers to the second-lowest ERA in the country last year; with Flukey and that bullpen, I’d expect a repeat performance from the strongest mid-major team in the country.

Key Player: Cameron Flukey, RHP
Flukey fought no. 3 overall pick Kade Anderson to a standstill in Game 1 of the national championship series last year, and with a strong junior season, he could easily go that high in the draft himself. The skinny 6-foot-6 righty from the Jersey Shore gets the most out of his height with an over-the-top release, contrasting a mid-to-upper-90s fastball with a devilish upper-70s hook. He’s one of my favorite pitchers to watch in all of college baseball.

Georgia Tech
Speaking of teams that recently lost legendary head coaches. Three of the 25 winningest coaches in college baseball history — including Gilmore — called it quits after 2024; Georgia Tech’s Danny Hall followed suit after last season.

Replacing Hall is James Ramsey, whom college baseball fans remember as that killer Florida State outfielder with glasses from a few years ago. Ramsey, a 2012 first-round pick, made it to Triple-A quickly but never managed to crack the big leagues. He caught on as an assistant coach under Hall one season after his playing career ended, and was named Hall’s successor at the age of 35. You might know Ramsey’s work as a hitting coach: Justyn-Henry Malloy, Kristian Campbell, and Chandler Simpson were all his students.

Hall played for a national championship in his first year with the Yellow Jackets, and Ramsey has a shot to do the same, because this lineup is loaded. D1Baseball ranks the top players at each position before the season; Georgia Tech has the no. 1 outfielder (Drew Burress), no. 2 second baseman (Cal transfer Jarren Advincula), no. 2 catcher (Vahn Lackey), top-30 players at the other three infield positions, and two other top-50 outfielders. The Jackets hit .314/.415/.539 as a team last year, with 81 stolen bases in 92 attempts; that feels like a solid baseline expectation for 2026.

Key Player: Drew Burress, OF
This is a short guy — 90% of baseball players who say they’re 5-foot-9 are trying to sneak one past you — with a solid running back build who has produced 44 home runs and 86 total extra-base hits in 118 career college games. Players Burress’ size with any kind of reputation for positive makeup often get pigeonholed as grinders. It’s meant as a compliment, but it hides the fact that some of these guys, like Burress, have scouting cards full of fives and sixes. So here’s a genuine compliment I’ll pay Burress: The way people talk about him reminds me of how people talked about Alex Bregman in his draft year.

UCLA
The Bruins celebrated their first year in the Big Ten by winning 48 games and tying for the regular-season conference title, and making their first trip to Omaha since 2025. And while most top teams get shredded every summer by the draft and transfer portal, UCLA only lost one player to the pros — 12th-round pitcher Cody Delvecchio — and bring back almost every other player of import.

Eight of UCLA’s top nine players last year in plate appearances were sophomores, including star shortstop Roch Cholowsky, the early Golden Spikes frontrunner. (More on him in a second.) And while the Bruins didn’t lose much, they added former Texas outfielder Will Gasparino — a 6-foot-6 slugger who hit 13 home runs last year — and managed to get Pirates second-rounder Angel Cervantes, a right-handed pitcher, to campus. This should be a lot like the team that went to the College World Series last year, only better in every way.

D1Baseball and Baseball America have UCLA as the no. 1 team in the preseason poll; the coaches’ poll and the NCBWA poll have UCLA second behind LSU. So if you miss UCLA early in the season, don’t worry; they’ll probably still be playing in June.

Player: Roch Cholowsky, SS
I met Cholowsky at the Draft Combine in 2023; back then, he was a terrific defensive shortstop with magnetic, superstar charisma but minor questions about the bat and overall athletic profile. He would’ve gone in the late first round or early second if his bonus demands hadn’t made him borderline unsingable. The son of a longtime major league scout who grew up around the Cactus League complexes, Cholowsky strongly preferred to spend a couple years at UCLA before going pro.

That turned out to be a good decision. Cholowsky started as a freshman and hit well: .308/.399/.500, with eight home runs, or a 115 wRC+ in the bonkers college offensive environment. Then he went berserk in a 66-game sophomore campaign: .353/.480/.710, with 23 home runs, 80 runs scored, 74 RBIs, and half again as many walks as strikeouts. And again, he’s a plus defensive shortstop. This is, in short, your presumptive no. 1 overall draft pick come July.

LSU
LSU is either the best team east of the Rockies or the best team in the country full stop, depending on how you feel about UCLA.

Under head coach Jay Johnson, LSU has always hit the transfer market hard, and with two national championships in the past three years, you can’t really argue with the results. This year’s Tigers have some fun transfers as well: former Oregon State infielder Trent Caraway, and former Grand Canyon first baseman Zach Yorke, who’s listed at 6-foot-2, 295 pounds.

As a longtime supporter of the wide college first baseman, Yorke’s arrival in Baton Rouge excites me. As it should Johnson, who loves a hoss despite being a small man himself. He’s coached Paul Skenes and Tommy White at LSU, Bobby Dalbec at Arizona, and Kris Bryant as an assistant at the University of San Diego.

But despite the customary influx of transfers, Johnson’s squad has plenty of returning talent from last year’s national championship team. The best player in the lineup is outfielder Derek Curiel, who was an on-base machine (.345/.470/.519) as a freshman, and will be trying to add some pop as he matures, alongside moving from left field to center.

Key Player: Steven Milam, SS
But my favorite player on this team is Steven Milam, another shortstop I interviewed at the 2023 Combine. He’s small enough to fit in Drew Burress’ pocket, but he hits hard line drives all over the field from both sides of the plate.

And he plays with tons of flair. Milam dyed his hair with purple and gold tiger stripes for the 2024 postseason, which you would’ve noticed after he hit a walk-off home run in his first NCAA Tournament game.

I remember asking him how his big leg kick would translate to college or the pros, and he seemed legitimately annoyed by the implication that it might not. There’s a ton to nitpick in his scouting profile at the next level, but Milam is a terrific college player.

Mississippi State
Brian O’Connor is a living legend. An Omaha native who reached the College World Series while pitching for Creighton, there’s an actual statue of him outside Charles Schwab Field Omaha, home of the College World Series. In addition to his one trip there as a player, O’Connor made seven others as head coach at Virginia — the only seven trips to Omaha in program history — and won a national championship in 2015. In 2027 or early 2028 at the latest, he’ll break the 1,000-win threshold.
O’Connor ran things in Charlottesville during his 22 seasons there, and he could’ve stayed another 22 years, won a ton more, and been more beloved than Thomas Jefferson when he hung ‘em up. Instead, he’s off to Mississippi State, which is the kind of high-risk/high-reward move I genuinely did not think O’Connor had in him.

If you follow almost any other sport, you know Mississippi State as an also-ran at the absolute most, but this is one of the marquee programs in college baseball. They have the Cadillac of college stadiums in the 15,500-seat Dudy Noble Field, and more money than God. I’ve been asked from time to time what school has the best atmosphere, and I go back and forth between Mississippi State and LSU, depending on whom I’m least afraid of offending at the time. (It’s a choice between being beaten to death with cowbells or drowned in a crawfish pot.)

O’Connor is more than doubling his salary by moving southwest, but he’s taking on a hell of a challenge. His predecessor, Chris Lemonis, made the College World Series in his first season in Starkville. Then came the COVID-shortened 2020 season, and then in 2021 Lemonis led the Bulldogs to the first national championship in school history. Not program history — Mississippi State had never before won a national championship in any team sport. That’s legend-making stuff.

Unfortunately, Mississippi State went 26-30 in 2022, and Lemonis was on the hot seat basically from his title defense year to the moment he got canned in mid-2025. This is not an easy crowd to please.

At Mississippi State, O’Connor will have resources the likes of which he could not have imagined even at old-money UVA, but he had better convert those resources into consistent trips to Omaha. Ask Lemonis how quickly things can go sideways here.

Key Player: Aidan Teel, OF
One of the things that defined O’Connor’s tenure at UVA was his ability to take advantage of the fact that the Mid-Atlantic states are a college baseball vacuum. If an elite high school player in eastern Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Maryland, or Delaware had an interest in playing college ball, O’Connor would have him. And if said player had a younger brother, O’Connor would recruit the pair.

So it came to pass with Zack and Jake Gelof of Rehoboth Beach, Dealware, and now Kyle and Aidan Teel of Mahwah, New Jersey. The elder Teel, now of the Chicago White Sox, played for O’Connor at UVA, where Aidan, a pitcher, followed. Aidan Teel took a medical redshirt his freshman year after tearing his UCL, then posted a 7.88 ERA as a redshirt freshman, at which point O’Connor moved him to center field.

It was there that Teel flourished, hitting .317/.442/.538 in his sophomore season, and when his coach moved to Mississippi State, Teel followed. So did former UVA commit Jack Bauer, the hardest-throwing left-handed pitcher in high school baseball history, and a host of other transfers. Johnson got on the national championship scoreboard at LSU with a microwave-ready roster of impressive transfers; perhaps his new conference rival can do the same.

UConn
The Mid-Atlantic region might be a college baseball vacuum, but New England occasionally produces a good team. In most cases, that’s UConn. Head coach Jim Penders has been around more than 20 years; he coached a team led by George Springer and Matt Barnes to a super regional in 2011. The Huskies got that far again in 2022 and 2024, but the long-awaited trip to Omaha has still not materialized.

Last year, UConn saw its streak of six straight NCAA Tournament appearances snapped by as close a margin as you’ll see. After tying for a fifth straight Big East regular season title, the Huskies lost to Creighton in a chaotic conference tournament final. That left UConn without the Big East’s automatic bid and just barely on the wrong side of the bubble for an at-large spot.

Cold-weather teams usually start the season on the road, playing tournaments and challenging road series. (In case you’re not up in the Northeast right now, it is not baseball-playing weather at the moment. I don’t remember the last time I saw my lawn.) Last year, UConn started 1-7 on that run before righting the ship with a win over Vanderbilt and a road series win at Miami.

The gauntlet isn’t quite as tough this year, though a lot of eyes will be on this weekend’s MLB Desert Invitational and UConn’s road trip through Arizona State and Arizona the following week. Surviving that run will go a long way toward building up a buffer for an at-large tournament bid. At least, the Huskies have to avoid a loss as bad as the one they took to Missouri last February.

Key Player: Tyler Minick, OF
UConn had five All-Big East players last year, of which only two — Tyler Minick and shortstop Rob Rispoli — are returning. Minick played a lot of first base last year, but he got pushed down the defensive spectrum by Rispoli and Ryan Daniels. He’s played a decent amount of shortstop in summer ball, and that’s where we have him listed on his player page. Apparently Minick is on the move again, this time to center field.

Wherever he plays, he’ll be able to handle the bat; Minick hit .355/.437/.734 in 2025, with 22 home runs in 54 games. The last person to come out of the Reading, Pennsylvania area and produce that many hits was Taylor Swift.

East Carolina
The Pirates are one of the most consistent mid-major programs in the country; 2025 was their seventh straight regional appearance and 21st in the past 26 seasons, dating back across four head coaches. (An interesting bit of trivia here: Current head coach Cliff Godwin took over from Billy Godwin. Even though both men are from North Carolina and I’ve only heard of maybe six people ever named Godwin, they’re not related.)

Like UConn, ECU has not been able to get over the hump and make it to Omaha in the 21st century, and like UConn, ECU had a bit of a rough year in 2025. The Pirates finished under .500 in the American Conference after winning the conference five years in a row, but made it back to a regional by winning the conference tournament.

A one-year hiccup after that much success isn’t worth tearing down the whole system over, and the Pirates are mostly relying on their returning players to mature and improve. The result is an experienced lineup, led by on-base machine Braden Burress, who hit .389/.488/.498 with 18 stolen bases. The lineup could use a little more pop; the Pirates only hit 73 home runs last season and placed 168th in the country in slugging percentage. Junior college transfer Jack Vogele might help in this respect; he hit .408 with 19 home runs last year, with 95 RBIs in 64 games.

Key Player: Ethan Norby, LHP
ECU doesn’t produce a ton of future big leaguers, but when the Pirates hit on a prospect, they really hit. Seven ECU players drafted since 2014 have made the majors. Six of those players were taken in the first two rounds, and four of those — Jeff Hoffman, Gavin Williams, Carson Whisenhunt, and Trey Yesavage — were pitchers.

Ethan Norby is the latest ace to come from the East Carolina pipeline, and he’s not a big, physical dude like the others. (Unlike the Godwins, yes, this Norby is the younger brother of Marlins third baseman Connor, who preceded him at East Carolina.) Norby is a 5-foot-10 lefty whose fastball sits in the low 90s — a legitimate command-and-guile dude by today’s standards.

Norby locates well for a college pitcher, and his low-80s slider is good enough to miss bats. He was one of 20 qualified pitchers in Division I last year with a K-BB% of 25.0% or higher. Is that a positive indicator? Well, five college pitchers went in the top 15 picks of last year’s draft — Tyler Bremner, Anderson, Liam Doyle, Jamie Arnold, and Kyson Witherspoon — and all of them were in the top 20 in K-BB%.

Unless he adds five ticks to his fastball, Norby isn’t going to get drafted that high, but I expect him to start Game 1 of a regional and go in the first 100 picks. And Norby has been working on his changeup at Tread Athletics this winter, so more and better is possible.