Iowa needs two wins over Ducks to bag a rare bird here: A Big Ten regular-season title

The last two weeks were pretty big for Iowa’s baseball team, but the Hawkeyes didn’t do very well.

This week is bigger.

Despite dropping two of three games at Washington followed by going 0-2-1 in three nonconference contests against Top Ten team Oregon State in Des Moines last weekend, the Hawkeyes are in first place in the Big Ten.

For the first time in 35 years, Iowa can win a Big Ten regular-season championship. It can celebrate on its home turf, in fact. There’s just one catch, no pun intended.

The Hawkeyes close regular-season play Thursday through Saturday at home against Oregon, ranked fifth in the nation. Thursday’s game is on FS1, with the next two on BTN. The Ducks need to sweep the Hawkeyes to have a chance to get as much as a piece of the title.

A good situation for Iowa, right? Sure, but winning the series against Oregon is a necessity. UCLA is one game behind the Hawkeyes, who are 21-6 in the Big Ten. Oregon is two back.

If UCLA sweeps its 3-game home set against Northwestern (12-15 in the conference) this week as you might expect, Iowa has to win two of three against Oregon to tie for first place. If the Hawkeyes were to sweep, the championship is theirs.

“Omaha hasn’t seen the last of us,” Hawkeyes head coach Duane Banks said after his team lost to Temple to be eliminated from the 1972 CWS. “We’ll be back … We’ll be back.”

He was right. The Big Ten tournament will be in Omaha next week, for the eighth time. As for the CWS? No, Iowa hasn’t been back since ‘72.

In fact, Michigan in 2019 and Indiana in 2013 are the only teams that were in the Big Ten at the time to reach the CWS since 1985.

The conference swiped Oregon, UCLA, USC and Washington from the Pac-12 last year. Its baseball improved exponentially.

The two teams currently ranked in d1Baseball.com’s Top 25 are No. 5 Oregon and No. 14 UCLA. Washington and USC join the other two Pac-12 refugees to form four of top six in the Big Ten standings.

The West Coast Kids probably feel Iowa is a paper tiger with its lighter schedule. In the national RPI, UCLA is 10th and Oregon 19th. Iowa is 67th.

You can only play whose on your schedule, though, and it’s still Iowa at 21-6 in the Big Ten to UCLA’s 20-7 and Oregon’s 19-8.

Oregon’s last regular-season conference title was in 1957, by the way. The school didn’t even have baseball between 1982 and 2008.

The Ducks play like they never took a 26-year hiatus. They were one win from the CWS in each of the last two years.

Oregon’s Mason Neville has 26 home runs, five more than anyone else in Division I. Four of his teammates have at least 11. Iowa has no one with more than nine.

One would assume Oregon has plans in place to stay in Iowa City as long as it takes Saturday. The same wasn’t the case for Oregon State Sunday in Des Moines. It had to leave Principal Park after the 10th inning to make it to the airport in time for a 6 p.m. westbound flight.

Thus, the Beavers game against Iowa ended in a 6-6 tie. It cost the Hawkeyes a chance to salvage a win in its series against a Top Five team.

Oregon State has no baseball conference. It was left in the lurch after the Pac-12 dissolved with 10 of its schools jumping to the Big Ten, Big 12 and even the ACC. It doesn’t have Oregon’s Nike money, so a 6 p.m. flight meant being on the 6 p.m. flight.

It was Iowa’s first tie since 2002, against Northern Iowa. The Panthers’ coach was, coincidentally, current Hawkeyes coach Rick Heller.

Heller has coached in 1,874 games, with five ties to go with 1,073 wins. He could really go for two or three more victories this week.

Comments: (319) 398-8440; mike.hlas@thegazette.com