Oregon baseball’s head coach is staying in Eugene. The Ducks will return key players to some of baseball’s premier positions, and a program-led organization dedicated to creating NIL opportunities for its athletes is thriving.

What’s more, the Ducks continue to be one of the school’s rare programs that benefited from the move to the Big Ten. Oregon is on the coast, near the baseball hotspots of Arizona and California; however, it plays in a midwestern-leaning conference while in season.

Things could be a whole lot worse in the Oregon baseball stratosphere right now.

And while replacing two weekend starters and over half of his lineup is easier said than done, head coach Mark Wasikowski has emerged as one of the country’s premier talent evaluators and developers, the main cog in the engine that had Oregon in regional play each of the last four years.

Perhaps the most important development for Oregon of late has been the expansion of its “Diamond Ducks” program, which helps greatly with revenue sharing and NIL. Dipping into that resource was likely a key factor in the Ducks landing Cal Scolari, a former WCC Pitcher of the Year from the University of San Diego.

“We had a number of guys we were after to try to bolster the staff,” Wasikowski said. “It’s really interesting now with the portal how that goes. It’s a lot.”

Things, of course, aren’t so shiny for most of the Big Ten, a conference that hasn’t won a National Title since Ohio State in 1966 and hasn’t appeared in the final since Michigan in 2019.

The strongest Big Ten teams on a year-to-year basis are the newcomers, with USC, UCLA, Washington and Oregon among the top programs prestige-wise in the program. In 2024, Indiana, Illinois and Nebraska were the top three teams in the conference. However, in 2025, Indiana was the highest-ranked of those three at No. 6 in the conference.

The general apathy of Big Ten baseball has Wasikowski’s Ducks in an interesting spot, schedule-wise. Oregon will likely play significantly fewer teams with a high RPI — a commonly used ranking system that takes into account strength of schedule and quality of wins — meaning that Oregon will have fewer chances throughout a season to bolster its postseason resume than an SEC team with stronger opponents. That situation has Wasikowski and his decision-makers debating strategy on who to play. Losing games early in the season against tougher opponents certainly does the Ducks little good as well.

“We’ve talked about that long and hard,” Wasikowski said. “We’re going to have to assess that on a year-to-year basis and see if it is. The off-balance schedule in the Big Ten is going to probably make that an interesting topic, depending on who you do and don’t play in the Big Ten every year.”

Another issue is that scheduling quality out-of-conference games is not as easy as it would seem, mostly due to Oregon’s success as a program.

“There are a lot of teams that also won’t play us right now which is unfortunate,” Wasikowski said. “We’ve gone as far as to try to go on the road and not even ask for a return series against SEC teams to just go and show up and play them at their place without even a guarantee to come and we’ve been told no.”

Of course, the fix to such a baseball issue is simple — win.

“Ultimately, you’ve got to win your games,” Wasikowski said. “So we need to win our games.”