This week a new College World Series champ will be crowned, and that champ will be from the South, and that is unlikely to change any time soon.

For the foreseeable future, unless they redo geography, Omaha in June is likely to look a lot like this year’s All SEC-ACC showdown.

Before LSU won its first NCAA baseball title in 1991 and began a string of southern teams showing up in the CWS as often as biscuits show up with butter, the Bible Belt Baseball Boys were generally out of the running by the end of May. In college hardball, the South just couldn’t hang. Didn’t care, really.

You can take this train of thought back to the inaugural Series in 1947, when California, led by future American League MVP Jackie Jensen, beat Yale two games to none.

USELESS INFORMATION ALERT HERE: Yale was the first team to have the popular mascot of Bulldogs. Louisiana Tech was the second. Also, Yale finished 19-10-1 that season, 9-3-1 in the always competitive Eastern Intercollegiate Baseball League. The other teams in the league finished either 7-5 or 6-6, which means they were the equivalent of any division in today’s NFL.)

Consider for a moment that Yale played 13 regular-season conference games back then. It was like a college football season today, with every game counting. Also of note (or could possibly be considered as More Useless Information), the Eli Nine were helped to the Series in ’47 by infielder George H.W. “Hot Corner” Bush, the future president, who is rumored to have kept his old Yale glove in his Oval Office desk drawer; never hurts to have your leather handy.

So, the game has changed — the Golden Bears finished the season 31-10 and got to play more games than the weather-addled Yale team — but what’s the same is that Yale and California weren’t from the South then and still aren’t. What the Golden Bears did was start a trend, one aided by the South’s love for football and the West Coast’s love for the more laid-back game of baseball. Pacific and Mountain Time teams would continue to dominate the Series for years, even decades, until LSU came along.

Check the record books pre-1990 and you will see a CWS dominated by Southern California, Arizona State and Arizona. Every now and then, a Texas or Miami would show up. During those formative years, teams from the north had all the impact of a snowball in a five-alarm fire, and that impact is the same today. To put it in perspective, Ohio State won a national title in 1966, the year Bush was first elected to the House of Representatives. A lot has happened since then, but one thing hasn’t: a Northern Team hasn’t sniffed the CWS.

Southern teams have won 11 of the past 14 College World Series — and finished second the three times Southern teams didn’t win it all.

For years and years, the West Coast had it made, baseball-wise. They had it made for sure — right up until the time the South started caring. And we won’t quit caring any time soon.

Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu