The data
Not a summary of the data — the data. Every figure below is the measured 2026 population, transcribed from the source tables and locked to them by a test.
The spread of team batting average across every college level, 2026. Lower divisions hit for a higher average than Division I — which is why scoring a team against a national average, instead of against its own level, flatters some programs and punishes others.
The same picture from the pitching side. A 5.50 team ERA is a below-average Power-4 staff and an above-average one almost anywhere else — the single clearest reason a recruiting board needs level-aware benchmarks.
What the number is
1,265 is the number of college programs whose complete season team statistics sit behind the Team Strength Profile: 304 NCAA D1 Programs, 249 NCAA D2 Programs, 379 NCAA D3 Programs, 179 NAIA Programs, 154 JUCO Programs. It is a data-population count, not a customer count and not a claim about how many programs use Sightline.
How it was built
Division I is the strongest layer: the complete 2026 NCAA ranking tables for all 304 D1 programs, split into two tiers — Power-4 conferences and everyone else — with a mean and standard deviation for each team stat. A team's percentile is its distance from its tier's mean, so a .291 batting average scores near the 70th percentile against the mid-major population and lower against the Power-4 one.
Division II, Division III, NAIA and junior college are fitted rows built from the same kind of published season tables. NAIA counts only the 179 programs that actually filed statistics, not the full membership. The junior-college row is NJCAA Division I specifically — the scholarship-bearing tier — not all junior-college baseball.
What it does not claim
Team-level population data is much deeper than player-level pricing data, especially below Division I. The Team Strength Profile is well supported at every level listed; the player valuation engine's own calibration is a separate, thinner dataset and is described on the methodology page rather than here.
Nothing in this table is inferred from another level. A D1 team is never scored against a D2 population — an earlier version of the engine did exactly that by accident, and the fix is part of why the tiers are listed explicitly above.
Sources
- NCAA Division I 2026 team statistics ranking tables (ncaa.com)
- NCAA Division II and III 2026 team statistics (ncaa.com)
- NAIA and NJCAA published season team statistics, fitted rows in Sightline's level_baselines table
Compiled August 19, 2026. A source with no link is a court filing, a research pack, or a table inside Sightline named in the entry.