Baseball among Top 100 programs in the country
SMITHFIELD, R.I. – The Bryant University baseball team is ranked one of the top 100 college baseball programs in the country according to D1Baseball.com.
Bryant comes in at No. 82 in this year's rankings, holding on to the spot it earned in 2017. The Bulldogs have won more games than any other Northeast program since the start of the 2011 season.
In 2019, the Black and Gold posted their fourth 40-win season in 11 seasons at the Division I level. Bryant won its eighth-straight Northeast Conference Regular-Season title and advanced to the NEC Championship round.
In addition to team success, the Bulldogs have also had 18 individuals drafted over the last seven seasons. James Karinchak, a ninth-round selection in 2017, made his Major League debut this past weekend for the Cleveland Indians. He is just the second player in program history to appear in an MLB game.
About the rankings
In the fall of 2015, we presented our inaugural Top 100 Programs rankings, which we described as an attempt to asses the overall health of each program in the current era. A lot can change quickly in college baseball, so we decided to make this a bi-annual exercise. We updated the Top 100 again in 2017. You can find those rankings here.
For the purpose of this exercise, we don't care what happened in the 1970s or 80s, or even the 90s — that's ancient history to a potential recruit in 2019. Tradition is nice, but it's more important to establish a tradition of consistent winning in the last decade, and especially in the last five years. Our ultimate goal here is to identify the programs in the best shape right now, with an eye toward the next five to 10 years.
So we began by awarding programs points for making regionals and having postseason success in the last five years, and a fewer amount of points for success between six and 10 years ago. That gave us a starting point; then editors Aaron Fitt and Kendall Rogers made adjustments based on evaluations of coaching staff quality and stability, facilities, scholarship/financial aid situation, conference dynamics, momentum, and recruiting and player development proficiency. As the chairman of the Division I Baseball Committee likes to say every year, it's more of an art than a science, but we tried to take many factors into consideration and debated our rankings internally at length. Reasonable minds will disagree on the rankings, and we want to hear your take, so weigh in with your own thoughts in the comments section below.