With the NCAA baseball tournament underway, a nation turns its eye toward America's favorite pastime at the amateur level. Nothing evokes feels of intense loyalty towards one's educational forum quite like a sports tournament, and while college baseball may pale in comparison to basketball or football in terms of national coverage, the product is just as exciting. Now a wide audience gets to experience it.

The best 64 teams from around the country have converged at various checkpoints to engage in a good, old-fashioned double-elimination showdown to see which clubhouse is the last standing. Vanderbilt is unsurprisingly the No. 1 overall seed, with Texas, Arkansas and Alabama constituting the other top seeds. Hmm... feels like something connects those teams.

Not unlike other major sports, the SEC tends to wield a powerful bat in the collective sense. That is the best conference in college baseball by a healthy margin, featuring plenty of future MLB stars and current NCAA standouts throughout the conference. Other top-16 seeds hail from the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and Sun Belt.

With the first round of games fully underway, here is the current record for each conference represented in the 2025 NCAA baseball tournament.

Overall, 29 conferences are involved in the NCAA baseball tournament.

The SEC led all conferences with 13 teams in the final bracket, but it has so far been a mixed bag for the powerhouse. Sheer volume won out eventually, but top-seeded Vanderbilt lost its second game of the tournament to Louisville. It does not feel like the SEC is the crème de la crème right now.

On the other hand, it has been a dominant showing thus far for the ACC, including several head-to-head victories over their rivals in the SEC. It has been a turbulent few years across all sports in the ACC, but between this tournament performance, Duke's continued basketball dominance, and a strong-ish pipeline of football talent, the conference certainly isn't dead yet.

Perhaps most disappointing has been the performance from the Big 12, with the third-most teams in the tournament, but a losing record overall through 2.5 days of action. Time will tell how long each conference holds out, but it has not been great for teams like TCU (0-2) and Cincinnati (1-2).

We have seen similarly mixed results in the Big Ten so far. For a conference who just recently experienced a massive expansion, they probably hoped for a more stirring presence in this tournament.

Alas, it feels like a battle of wills between the SEC and the ACC right now. Those conferences dominate the top overal seeds and simply have the advantage of volume compared to other major (and mid-major) conferences.