A month ago, this College World Series final would have looked like a giant mismatch. Of course, it's never that simple in Omaha, where all but one game has been decided by three runs or fewer in the run-up to this week's championship series at TD Ameritrade Park.
Vanderbilt, the national No. 2 seed which paced the nation's strongest conference for most of the season, will play for its second national championship of the decade. In its way is Michigan, which earned one of the last four at-large bids into the field of 64 and proceeded to capitalize on the chaos of tournament baseball, knocking off top-seeded UCLA during Super Regionals and shutting down the decorated opponents on its half of the CWS bracket.