West Virginia baseball pulled off a rare feat on Thursday evening -- they fell in defeat on the diamond will simultaneously capturing their first-ever outright Big 12 Championship.
The Mountaineers hosted Kansas in Game One of a three-game weekend series, and the Jayhawks shutout the Mountaineers 3-0 -- however, the Mountaineers carried a three-game lead in the conference standing into the closing weekend of the regular season, so they only needed one of two things to happen. The Mountaineers either required at least one loss from second-place program Arizona State, or a sole win themselves during their series against Kansas.
On Thursday, despite WVU's loss, Arizona State couldn't keep their hopes alive for a league title as they traveled to Stillwater, Okla. and fell 6-2 to the Oklahoma State Cowboys. The loss means that the Mountaineers could be swept this weekend and still walk away the outright conference champions.
West Virginia previously captured a shared Big 12 Championship in 2023, when the conference was a nine-team baseball league -- the Mountaineers shared the title that year with Texas and Oklahoma State. It is their sixteenth overall conference championship in program history.
The victory should put the Mountaineers in prime position headed into next week's Big 12 Baseball Tournament -- the tournament switches to a 12-team single-elimination format from the previous double-elimination format (featuring eight teams until last year's expansion to ten teams), and the top four teams will earn a bye.
This will be of critical importance to the Mountaineers, who have had terrible luck in the opening round of the tournament the past three years -- dropping their first two games and facing early elimination each season. They will hope this year's first-round bye and favorable seefding will result in better luck as they'll seek their first-ever Big 12 Tournament Championship.