Trying to add a payment method? You can do this on the 
QuickTake:
The Ducks pushed Texas to the final innings, but the larger lesson was familiar: In modern college sports, clearing the last hurdle often comes down to cash.
AUSTIN, Texas — Mark Wasikowski is a stoic man.
His expression and tone don’t change much from win to loss, the result of a lifetime in a sport where even the best team’s year can end in some form of disappointment.
When the 29th season of his coaching career finished Sunday night with a 6-5 loss to Texas in the Austin Super Regional, the 55-year-old quietly gathered his papers in the dugout. His players stood on the top step and watched the Longhorns celebrate. The coach then led his team into left field for the last debrief of the year. Texas players soon followed in the same direction, leaving the field to bask in the adulation of the home fans.
About 30 minutes later, Wasikowski emerged in the press room with third baseman Drew Smith, whose eyes watered and whose cheeks were swollen after the last game of his four-year Oregon career.
“We are by and large a homegrown product. We are not a transfer portal school,” Wasikowski said. “It’s probably why they’re very emotional. It’s because they’ve been in this program, and their blood, sweat and tears have been in this program.
“When you’re that invested, it’s harder.”
Baseball has a particular cruelty at the end. It can be dramatic. It can be random. It always tugs at the hearts of players who spend more hours competing than anyone else in college sports.
And while Wasikowski was talking about his team after its 61st game of 2026, I got the sense he was including himself.
The Ducks have been very good in his seven years. He took a program stuck in neutral and brought it to the precipice of its long-established goal.
It’s hard to make a College World Series. Ask No. 1 UCLA. Ask LSU, Tennessee and Kansas — a trio of programs that have invested heavily in college baseball’s arms race and aren’t among the eight going to Omaha. Ask Oregon State, whose season was ended by the Ducks last week in the Eugene Regional.
Ask Wasikowski, who for the third time in the last four years fell one round short of getting Oregon there for the first time since baseball was reinstated at Oregon in 2009.
Troy University is going to Omaha this year for the first time. Same with West Virginia. There is still enough weirdness in college baseball to make the sport feel charming, unpredictable and, in some ways, like one of the last relics of what college sports used to be.
But that’s mostly a mirage.
The randomness is real. The romance is real. So is the money that is coming for the sport.
And that’s why Oregon can’t let this hurt convince it to back off.
I was reminded of my sit-down with Wasikowski last fall, when we talked about the larger forces coming for the sport. Back then, Wasikowski said Oregon’s budget to sign and retain top-level talent wasn’t “even 20%” of what the sport’s elite spend. And while the Ducks were very good in 2026 — they won 40-plus games, hosted a regional, beat Oregon State and pushed Texas to the final innings of a Super Regional — they still weren’t good enough to beat one of the closest things college sports has to a professionalized operation.
Texas’ athletic department spending in fiscal year 2025 was $375.9 million — more than double Oregon’s $183 million in expenses. Texas spends far more in-house on baseball, and its players pull in far more out-of-house in NIL.
That separation, financially — in sports other than football — helps explain why the Longhorns ended the Oregon women’s basketball season two months earlier on this same campus.
It helps explain why former Oregon softball coach Mike White, who left for more money at Texas in 2018, was honored on the Jumbotron in Austin during the Super Regional, just days after winning his second consecutive Women’s College World Series title with the Longhorns.
“That’s what SEC schools are doing right now,” Wasikowski said in September. “The SEC schools are just acquiring talent. If there’s a kid that develops slowly or doesn’t become an all-conference player immediately, they’ll just go straight to the portal and replace them. We don’t have the luxury to do that. We’re not going to be able to go up against SEC schools right now and beat them on the high-end transfer portal players that are proven All-Americans.
“One answer would be to match them dollar for dollar and see if it helps. Of course it would help. If you exclude the fiscal avenues, it comes down to developing your talent, your locker room, your culture and continuing to bring in excellent coaches and staff.”
The Ducks did a lot of that. All six players Oregon put on the Big Ten all-conference teams began their Division I careers with the Ducks.
Naulivou Lauaki Jr. was supposed to be a pitcher. Smith had 14 home runs in his Oregon career until socking 16 as a senior. Devin Bell, who was pitching at Western Oregon a year ago, was the one Wasikowski believed in to get the job done in the eighth.
That’s development. That’s culture. That’s their model.
And it still wasn’t enough this time.
Oregon does not need to tear down what it has built. It shouldn’t abandon the developmental identity that has made Wasikowski’s program one of the most consistent in the country.
And as I wrote late Sunday night, the Ducks are well situated to make another run in 2027.
My airline connection through Minneapolis on Monday took my flight from Austin directly over Omaha. Had Oregon won the Super Regional, I would have had to be there on Friday on a one-way ticket for a tournament that can last up to 11 days.
I couldn’t help but think about how much that would have cost us at Lookout.
Then I wondered how often Wasikowski has the same thought about his Ducks.
