D1Baseball’s Rooney is optimistic the Big West can return to its previous baseball heights but contends that to do so, the “league must focus on helping its best teams reach the postseason. RPI is a metric synonymous with the NCAA Tournament. The West Coast’s inherent challenges with RPI are well documented. The Big West is currently deploying a 10-week conference season. That is too many weeks. Every week of the Big West conference season is another step in what has become an RPI death march. An eight-week league season makes more sense. It’s not a perfect round-robin format, but those are rarities in today’s college athletics anyways.” Rooney suggests using those two newly open weeks to “play a nonconference series on the road versus a perennial winning program” and launch a conference tournament