final 2014 kansas high school top 25
By Sean McCann and Rob Fleeup
Prep Baseball Report Kansas
Now that the all of the state tournaments are complete we've had a few days to look over each team's season and have come up with our final Top 25 team rankings. Since we take a combined approach we have to mesh all of the classes together taking into consideration their regular season record and strength of schedule while also heavily weighting their post-season success.
It goes without saying that each team that won their state tournament is the final #1-ranked team in their class and will soon sport rings indicating as much. Consistent with this approach we ranked the state champion higher than any other team in that team's class in our Top 25.
Also, all six state champions are included in this poll: #1 St. Thomas Aquinas (5A), #2 Blue Valley (6A), #13 DeSoto (4A-I), #16 Bishop Ward (4A-II), #17 Wellsville (3A) and #22 St. Mary's Colgan (1-2A).
Once we decided on our approach to putting this poll together the next step was to figure out who indeed was the top team in the state. Logic says the team that wins the state tournament in the class with the biggest schools should be #1. We went against the grain on this by ranking 5A champ St. Thomas Aquinas as the top team, taking into consideration they had a stronger regular season performance than 6A state titleholder Blue Valley as the Saints won the Eastern Kansas League title, a league with #2 Blue Valley, #3 Blue Valley West, #6 Blue Valley Southwest and #12 Blue Valley Northwest in it.
From there we continued to weigh the main factors listed above as we completed the next 22. In addition, we included several bubble teams that made strong cases for Top 25 consideration.
Enough analysis - here is the final 2014 Prep Baseball Report Kansas High School Top 25:
