re: As objectively as possible...where does college baseball stand in importance?

I would rather bleed from my eyes than watch women's basketball.

Softball...that's a different story

Baseball is prob 3rd on average in the south. Probably even on the West coast as well.

Midwest is hockey along with north east.

I get what your asking but I think you use bad wording in your question. The question should be "where does baseball stand in popularity?" Sports shouldn't be rated by importance because they are games and therefore inherently not important. The only people who put real importance on sports are the crazies who call in to Finebaum. To answer your question baseball falls in third or fourth depending on where you are and won't ever come close to basketball for second. Doesn't mean people can't enjoy it more or care more about there baseball team but as a whole it will never be second. Football might have 100 times more fans and get 100 times more money poured in but is not any more important because it is still a game.

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Sports shouldn't be rated by importance because they are games and therefore inherently not important.

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Whoever says womens basketball is 3rd is either a UT fan or a Baylor fan.

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I realize this is an SEC board, but its a national question, and one of the problems with college baseball is how incomplete its national presence is. SEC has real baseball, but the other conferences have incomplete baseball representation. Wisconsin, Colorado and Iowa St don't even have baseball, and there are several schools in each conference that have always been terrible.

On a purely entertainment level, I can't stand college baseball using metal bats. the metallic 'ding' should exist in little league and no where else.

But by far the biggest problem with college baseball is how poorly it translates to professional baseball in comparison to football and basketball. MLB is dominated by players who either skipped college, or are foreign nationals.

For these reasons I find WBB to be a better product nationally than Baseball. if the other 4 power conferences had a product similar to the SEC I would feel differently.

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if the other 4 power conferences had a product similar to the SEC I would feel differently.

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Logical and fair.

Here, in the SEC, baseball is 3rd but not as distant a 3rd place as it is on the national level. I also think that the SECNetwork has and will do wonders for baseball and narrow that gap even further. I really wouldn't be surprised if down the road basketball and baseball become 2a and 2b behind football. I think the SECNetwork is going to benefit baseball almost more than any other sport. While we get more games, there has always been plenty of football before and I'd be bitching if there was one weekend that I didn't see my own team.

Nationally, i don't know if baseball will ever close the gap. Not until more games are televised like we get in the SEC. And anything north...good luck. We have a hard enough time in our weather in COMO. I don't know what the Pac12 does with their network and covering games. The Big 12 could put together some solid baseball programming but they've got that little longhorn network issue to deal with.

Actually the whole anybody any good skips college baseball no longer holds water. While it might have been that way in the past the stats don't show that any more. The numbers are pretty even on American born kids getting to pro's from college or straight out of high school. Somebody posted the link on here sometime last year I think and kids who played college ball might have even been a few percentage points more than the high school kids when you look at American kids

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Baseball is 3rd in certain regions. Hockey is 3rd in others.

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And Baseball bitch slaps hockey nationally. Not even in the same stratosphere. The cws final had 6 times the amount of viewers as the frozen four. 6 freaking times

Baseball is a distant 3rd behind Football and Basketball. If your school is good at baseball, you act like it's more important than it really is. I mean how many schools even make money on baseball? Maybe 8 total? All power 5 conference schools make money on basketball.