Final college baseball top 25: Oklahoma wins national championship, takes No. 1 spot

The 2026 college baseball season ended on Monday night with Oklahoma claiming its first national title since 1994, edging North Carolina in three games at Charles Schwab Field in Omaha, Neb.

Oklahoma and North Carolina, not surprisingly, are Nos. 1 and 2 in The Athletic’s final top 25. The Sooners, unranked in the preseason, finished the year on one of the all-time great runs — beating the regular-season and tournament champs from the ACC (Georgia Tech), Big 12 (Kansas) and SEC (Georgia) en route to an unlikely national title. The Tar Heels were ranked No. 10 in the preseason but quickly asserted themselves as one of the nation’s elite teams.

The other six teams in the CWS field make up the rest of the top eight. If you made it through two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, you’ve done enough to deserve a top-eight finish.

For the rest of the ranking, I didn’t simply reward postseason success. It was a combination of what teams did in the regular season and their performance in the NCAA Tournament — skewing more toward the regular season.

That’s why you don’t see Cal Poly in the top 25. Congrats to the Mustangs on a great season, but they won the Los Angeles Regional without having to play the host, UCLA, and then lost two games in the Supers to West Virginia by a combined score of 29-3. Little Rock was a tough omission — especially since Jacksonville State is ranked No. 24 and the Trojans beat the Gamecocks twice in the Hattiesburg Regional — but its body of work (39-28 overall, 16-11 in the OVC) just didn’t warrant a spot in the top 25.

Three teams that didn’t even reach the finals in the Regionals remained in the ranking: UCLA (No. 10), Nebraska (No. 20) and Tennessee (No. 25).

The Bruins went 52-8, including 28-2 in the Big Ten, but lost twice to No. 4 seed Saint Mary’s in the Los Angeles Regional. The Cornhuskers (43-17, 23-7 Big Ten) beat South Dakota State in the opener of the Lincoln Regional before losing to Ole Miss and Arizona State.

Tennessee, which went 0-2 in the Chapel Hill Regional, was a tough call. The deciding factor for the Vols: They went 8-7 against the College World Series field, with series wins over Alabama, Texas and Oklahoma. That’s pretty strong.