Coastal Carolina captured its first national championship (Eric Sorenson)

Finals-Bound Coastal Is No Cinderella

OMAHA — As Coastal Carolina closed in on a 7-5 win against TCU and its first-ever trip to the CWS Finals, a reader on Twitter posed an interesting question: Would Coastal Carolina be a bigger surprise than Fresno State winning in 2008? It was a fair question — Coastal is a first-time CWS participant, the champion of a conference that had never sent a team to Omaha, and 10 of the last 11 national champions (all of them except Fresno) hailed from one of the Power Five conferences.

But a deeper look paints a different picture. Like Fresno[…]