Kansas baseball wins first outright Big 12 title since 1949

Kansas baseball ended a 77-year wait for a regular-season conference championship and turned it into a program-shifting spring for Lawrence. The Jayhawks clinched the outright Big 12 title with a 7-6 win over BYU on Friday in Provo, Utah, then watched West Virginia’s 4-0 loss to TCU seal the crown the same night.

The victory gave Kansas a 39-15 regular-season record and a 22-7 mark in Big 12 play, good for the No. 1 seed in the Big 12 tournament in Surprise, Arizona, which begins Thursday. It also put the Jayhawks in position to press for a regional at Hoglund Ballpark, a possibility that would bring postseason baseball back to Lawrence and deepen the team’s reach in Douglas County.

For a program that entered the season picked to finish tied for fifth in the Big 12 preseason coaches poll, the finish was a clear overachievement. Kansas set school marks with 22 conference wins, eight Big 12 series victories and 20 road wins, and it became the first Big 12 school to post 20 conference wins in back-to-back seasons since Nebraska in 2000 and 2001. The Jayhawks had won seven straight Big 12 series before a late-season loss to West Virginia, then bounced back to close the deal.

The title was Kansas’s first regular-season conference championship since 1949 and only the fourth in school history, joining titles from 1923, 1924 and 1949, when KU played in the Big Seven. That gap gives the moment its weight: this was not just another strong season, but a break from generations of near misses and middle-of-the-pack finishes.

Dan Fitzgerald, hired June 15, 2022, has reshaped the program in less than four years. Kansas already reached the NCAA Tournament in 2025 for the first time since 2014, and Fitzgerald was named Big 12 Coach of the Year as the program’s rise accelerated. He called the title “four years in the making” and credited his family, the coaching staff, Jayhawk Nation and the administration for helping carry the team to this point.

The bigger test now is whether the breakthrough can change Kansas baseball’s business and civic profile as much as its record. A conference title, a possible regional at Hoglund Ballpark and another postseason run could lift attendance, strengthen recruiting and give Lawrence another marquee fall and spring draw tied directly to the university.