How has the highest-seeded team in Omaha fared historically?

Georgia baseball is headed to the College World Series for the first time in 18 seasons.

The No. 3-seeded Bulldogs are the highest-seeded team remaining in a field that also has the Nos. 5, 6, 7 and 16 teams still in the mix.

UGA’s road to a championship is still a tricky minefield, beginning with No. 6 Texas on Saturday — currently with Georgia as an underdog — and then possibly playing No. 7 Alabama or a red-hot Oklahoma team that has knocked out national seeds Georgia Tech and Kansas in consecutive weeks.

While Georgia was seeded into the more difficult of the two brackets, this is a team that arguably played in the toughest super regional, having had to beat 14th-seeded Mississippi State.

“I think we had the hardest super regional in the country,” UGA coach Wes Johnson said Tuesday. “I told (Mississippi State coach) Brian O’Connor after the game, ‘This is kind of crazy. We should have been doing this in (Charles Schwab Field, where the CWS is played).’ I don’t set the seeding.”

Seeding has not historically been a good indicator of eventual winner.

Since 1999, only two No. 1-seeded teams have won the national championship — Miami (1999) and Tennessee (2024) — but No. 3 seeds are tied for the most title winners with three.

Only four times in that time frame has the highest seed gone on to win the CWS: 1999 Miami, 2000 LSU, 2019 Vanderbilt and 2024 Tennessee.

Fourteen of the previous 26 modern-era champions (excluding the 2020 COVID season) were nationally ranked. Of those 14 winners, 10 were from the SEC, which has dominated the sport in the last decade.

The conference has won seven of the last eight baseball titles, including a six-year winning streak, which has a good chance of staying alive as five of the final eight teams standing are from the SEC.

However, only 2024 Tennessee and 2019 Vanderbilt also won the SEC tournament. They both also won the conference regular season title too

If Georgia makes the championship series, historical odds are on its side. Since the two-bracket format went into effect in 1988, 68% of winners have come from Pod 2.