Titans Make It Easy for NCAA to Slap Them Around Again

It keeps getting worse.

The Cal State Fullerton baseball team planned, expected, deserved, it says, to host its NCAA super-regional series against Ohio State this weekend and yet the No. 3-seeded Titans were sent off to play at the Columbus home of the unseeded Buckeyes.

And then four Titans--No. 1 starting pitcher Adam Johnson, starting second baseman David Bacani, utility infielder Chad Olszanski and pitcher Marco Hanlon--will be home in Fullerton after all. Because three got drunk and all of them acted stupid, threw rocks off a roof Sunday night in South Bend, Ind., and got themselves arrested.

So now Fullerton has totally lost its moral high ground and blown the sympathy vote. Geez, Titans, go ahead and make it really easy for the NCAA to treat you disrespectfully.

After the Titans had won the four-team, first-round regional at Notre Dame last weekend, the team, its officials and its fans expected the NCAA to accept Fullerton’s bid, its bare minimum bid, to host the super-regional Friday, Saturday and Sunday, a best-of-three series against the Buckeyes. But Ohio State got the NCAA nod instead and there were plenty of Fullerton fans who were tremendously unhappy about how the Titans were dissed.

Unfair, they e-mailed and called. Unfair that Fullerton, a three-time national champion and a team that has been ranked among the top five for much of this season, had to beat unranked Michigan and Notre Dame in South Bend last weekend and now has to beat unranked Ohio State in two out of three games this weekend in Columbus in order to advance to the College World Series in Omaha.

So sure were Fullerton athletic officials that their bid would be accepted that they had a 20-page tournament guide ready to be printed Monday. More than 400 all-tournament tickets had been sold. Plans were in place to put up bleachers and increase seating capacity at Titan Field from 1,700 to 2,500.

But all this meant nothing after the Buckeyes drew more than 15,000 to its 4,450-seat stadium last weekend and doubled the Titans’ bid of $35,000 to the NCAA for the honor of playing at home again.

Looking for further insults to Fullerton? It is the only one of the top eight seeded teams to be sent on the road. Two host teams, Rice and Baylor, have either no home stadium or an incomplete one. The day Rice’s regular season ended, its stadium began being torn down. Rice will host Southwestern Louisiana at the Astrodome, which isn’t the atmosphere you’d want for an NCAA tournament game.

Baylor’s stadium is under construction and many fans will be sitting on concrete slabs and dirt this weekend when the Bears host Oklahoma State. One Rice official called the Baylor stadium situation “a lawsuit waiting to happen,” and yet Baylor got the home games.

Stanford, Fullerton Coach George Horton said, put in the minimum bid of $35,000, same as Fullerton. Stanford nearly always bids the minimum and nearly always gets to host. Horton says “Stanford has always done just the bare minimum all across the board because so few schools out here on the West Coast are capable of competing and Stanford knows the NCAA needs a West Coast regional.”

So, yes, Fullerton people, be angry. Be a little bitter if you’d like. Then, get real.

Fullerton made it easy to be treated this way. Fullerton treats its only nationally accomplished athletic program in the same way the NCAA did on Monday. Without much respect.

The 1,700-seat stadium at the 24,000-student university, while it is pretty and cozy and a wonderful place to watch a game, is just not worthy of a top-five program. The Titans have no radio or television exposure. The other seven seeded teams have their games broadcast on radio. Most have some games televised. Except for last Friday’s opening NCAA tournament game against Michigan, which was picked up by a small radio station in Buena Park, the only way to have kept up with games was if you had a computer, Internet access and enough memory to download a site off the web and listen on your laptop.

Horton says his best friend donated some money to help Fullerton meet the minimum bid total. The coach shouldn’t have to hit up friends for cash.

There is a tough lesson here for Fullerton. The Stanfords of the world can get away with doing the bare minimum. Fullerton can’t.

The NCAA expanded its baseball tournament from 48 to 64 teams this year in large part to help make the game more national and less of a Florida-Texas-Arizona-California thing. The NCAA wants to be able to have tournament games in places like South Bend and Columbus.

Horton argues passionately here, as he did with the NCAA selection committee, that “we’ve been a very significant baseball program that has been traveling to the tournament for 24 years. What better new environment than the most successful road team in NCAA baseball history? I’m not crying the blues, but what better market, better place with lots of people where baseball is very, very important than Fullerton? And I have one last word. Ohio State did get to host. Last weekend.”

While the Fullerton people have said they were led to believe that the No. 1 factor of who would host these super-regional games was the seeding, clearly when Ohio State drew so well last weekend for the first round, Fullerton seeding meant nothing, Fullerton’s baseball history meant nothing.

Fullerton did the honorable thing by sending the four rock-throwing players home. It is an action that might very well cost the Titans a World Series trip. It is an action that isn’t always taken by big, important programs. Remember how Lawrence Phillips managed to play in Nebraska’s big bowl game no matter what he’d been charged with?

Maybe the NCAA will give Fullerton credit some day for doing the right thing. In the meantime, though, Fullerton also needs to step to the plate and get going on an expanded baseball stadium, get its team a radio contract and act like it deserves a big-time baseball program.

Diane Pucin can be reached at her e-mail address: diane.pucin@latimes.com