If two is company, and three is a crowd, then a crowd of Big Ten teams will start NCAA Super Regionals this weekend.
And if you had said that two months ago, we all would have said you were crazy.
Sure, Michigan was a preseason favorite to make the Women’s College World Series, but three Big Ten teams in the Super Regionals? No way.
Yet, here we are, with Minnesota, Nebraska and the Wolverines all gearing up for the softball equivalent of the Sweet 16.
All year long we heard about how Michigan’s biggest weakness was its schedule. How it wouldn’t be ready to face the powerhouse Pac-12 and SEC teams come tournament time, and that every loss to a conference opponent was one more whack to the nail that was inevitably waiting in the Wolverines’ coffin.
And all season, we accepted that, even agreed with it, because outside of Ann Arbor, the Big Ten looked mediocre.
Now, though, we have to eat our words, because the Big Ten proved us wrong last weekend — at least partially.
No one will argue that the Big Ten is the Pac-12 or the SEC. Each of those conferences has four teams — all seeded — in the Super Regionals.
To be fair, those losses to weak conference foes like Illinois and Purdue did hurt Michigan. The Wolverines, once ranked as high as No. 3 in the nation, entered the tournament unseeded, setting up a regional at No. 9 seed Arizona State.
Facing hard-throwing Sun Devil right-hander Dallas Escobedo — a significant step up from the Big Ten’s best in the circle — conventional wisdom told us the Wolverines had a better than even chance of being eliminated in the regional final.
Michigan had already dropped a game to the Arizona State earlier in the double-elimination tournament and, with the Wolverines needing to win two straight against Escobedo to advance, that conventional wisdom appeared to be right. But then, even despite flu-like symptoms from its two best hitters, Michigan stole the first game, setting up a winner-take-all game.
With sophomore shortstop Sierra Romero going 0-for-4, and the score sitting 4-3 in favor of the Sun Devils with one out in the seventh inning, it looked like our mid-season guesswork would prove accurate after all. Then, sophomore outfielder Sierra Lawrence and senior designated player Taylor Hasselbach pounded back-to-back solo shots. Then, senior outfielder Lyndsay Doyle robbed a walk-off home run. Then, suddenly, the Wolverines had won.
No one saw it coming, but maybe someone should have.
For the last four series of the regular season, the Wolverines dropped every opener. And each time except one, they came back to sweep the rest of the series.
This is a Michigan team that found itself trailing in every series it played since mid-April. That was the case because the Big Ten, even if not up to par with the SEC or Pac-12, had enough competition to at least challenge the Wolverines.
So when Michigan needed to come back to oust Pac-12 foe Arizona State, it did so without breaking any more of a sweat than the Arizona heat warranted, because it was used to doing just that.
Now the Big Ten has three teams in the Super Regionals, just one less than the power conferences, and it boasts the only two unseeded teams, Michigan and Nebraska. To get there, those three teams had to go a combined 6-3 against teams from the Pac-12 and SEC. Sure, Auburn, Missouri and Arizona State weren’t necessarily the class of their respective conferences, but they are all ranked in the top 20 nationally.
In the next round, Minnesota and Nebraska will face Oregon and Alabama, the No. 1 and No. 2 overall seeds from the Pac-12 and SEC, respectively. We can all agree the road probably ends here for both of them.
Then again, we’ve been wrong before.