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With Arizona’s baseball team in the best-of-three championship series of the College World Series, the university has the opportunity to achieve its 18th national team title in school history.
(Pac-12.org graphic)
The Wildcats, unbeaten in three games in the CWS, await the winner of today’s Arkansas-South Carolina game for the start of the championship series, which begins Sunday at TD Ameritrade Park in Omaha, Neb.
If the UA captures the national championship, the school would remain in ninth place among Pac-12 institutions in terms of the number of team titles won. But Wildcat athletics would reduce the number to four to catch Colorado for a spot in the upper-division of the conference. More importantly, especially to ardent Arizona fans, the Wildcats would be five away from catching arch-rival Arizona State at the No. 5 spot.
UCLA (108 championships earned), Stanford (103) and USC (95) are seemingly unreachable at the top three of the conference. California is fourth with 32, followed by ASU (23), Colorado (22), Utah (20), Oregon (19) and then Arizona (17).
Washington (six), Oregon State (three) and Washington State (two) round out the conference. Hard to believe: The Huskies do not have a men’s championship in school history; all six are their titles are in women’s sports.
(Pac-12.org graphic)
Washington, however, claims two national titles in football, but the NCAA does not officially declare titles at the FBS level because various polls, formulas and other third-party systems have been used to determine national championships, all of which are not universally accepted.
USC claims 11 national football championships, California five, Washington two, and Colorado, Stanford, and UCLA one each.
True to its home in the western region, in which outdoor sports are conducive to the weather, the conference boasts the most team titles in men’s tennis (53), men’s outdoor track and field (45) and men’s water polo (38).
The next sport with 27 titles is skiing — skiing? — because of the addition of Rocky Mountain institutions Colorado and Utah to the conference in 2011-12. Colorado has 17 men’s and women’s skiing national titles and Utah has 10. If the Wildcats win the CWS title, it would be the Pac-12’s 27th baseball championship, tying skiing for that amount.
In terms of individual NCAA titles earned, heading into the 2011-12 school year, Arizona had 146 champions, which ranked fifth in the conference behind Stanford (439), USC (363), UCLA (262) and California (197).
Here is a list of the 17 national team championships won by Arizona:
MEN
Baseball 3 — 1976, 1980, 1986
Basketball 1 — 1996-97
Golf 1 — 1992
Swimming and Diving 1 — 2008
WOMEN
Softball 8 — 1991, 1993, 1994, 1996, 1997, 2001, 2006, 2007
Golf 2 — 1996, 2000
Swimming and Diving 1 — 2008
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