Just like basketball — the SEC is projected to have double-digit teams in NCAA Baseball Tournament, with the selection show a week and a half away.
College baseball has arrived at the home stretch portion of the 2025 season. This is the final weekend of regular-season play. The following weekend will be reserved for the conference tournaments, which lead into the selection show on Monday, May 26. USA TODAY Sports has fresh NCAA Tournament projections heading into the final two weekends of competition before the brackets are revealed.
Here’s a small snippet to give you a taste of where things stand:
“As usual, the SEC is front and center. LSU has moved up to the No. 2 overall seed after a series win against Arkansas. Vanderbilt is now comfortably among the top eight after taking a series from Tennessee, which has slipped a bit in the pecking order. In another development, Texas A&M has fallen completely out of the projected field after being swept by Missouri. The season has been a major disappointment for the Aggies, last year’s national runners-up who began the year with the No. 1 ranking.”
If you’re sensing that the SEC, much like men’s basketball, is going to put a truckload of teams into the 2025 NCAA Baseball Tournament, you’re right. We’ll invite you to read the USA TODAY article to get the specific number, but yes, it’s a hefty figure. Purely for the sake of comparison, the SEC put 14 teams into the basketball tournament.
The baseball version of the NCAA Tournament has 64 teams grouped into 16 regionals with four teams each. A big deal in this process: which 16 schools get to host these regionals. That’s the prize schools aim for. Without disclosing all 64 projected teams, we can give you the 16 projected regional hosts, which — by virtue of hosting — would be the top seed in their respective regional grouping:
No. 1 seed — Texas
The Longhorns will host the Austin Regional.
No. 2 seed — LSU
The Tigers will host the Baton Rouge Regional.
No. 3 seed — Florida State
The Seminoles will host the Tallahassee Regional.
No. 4 seed — Arkansas
The Razorbacks will host the Fayetteville Regional.
No. 5 seed — Georgia
The Bulldogs will host the Athens Regional.
No. 6 seed — Auburn
The Tigers will host the Auburn Regional.
No. 7 seed — Vanderbilt
The Commodores will host the Nashville Regional. You can see that six of the top seven projected seeds are from the SEC. It’s a lot like the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament, an event in which the SEC had 14 teams in the field and had four of the top eight seeds in the bracket.
No. 8 seed — North Carolina
The Tar Heels will host the Chapel Hill Regional.
No. 9 seed — Oregon State
The Beavers will host the Corvallis Regional. Oregon State is the first team from a non-SEC, non-ACC conference to host a regional as a national seed.
No. 10 seed — Coastal Carolina
The Chanticleers could host the Myrtle Beach Regional. You will notice that we switched from saying “will” to “could.” This is because at the No. 10 seeding spot, we begin to get into uncertainty about which teams will or won’t host regionals. The first eight or nine spots look fairly solid in terms of hosts. You should generally consider the 10-16 seeding spots — the final seven teams hosting a regional — as being open and fluid heading into the final games before the selection show.
No. 11 seed — UCLA
The Bruins could host the Los Angeles Regional.
No. 12 seed — Clemson
The Tigers could host the Clemson Regional.
No. 13 seed — Tennessee
The Vols could host the Knoxville regional. This is where we get into the subsection of teams which are near the cut line. If you do or don’t see your team announced as a regional host in these last few slots, you will begin to realize that other teams have jumped yours for one of the final hosting positions.
No. 14 seed — Oregon
The Ducks could host the Eugene Regional.
No. 15 seed — Alabama
The Crimson Tide could host the Tuscaloosa Regional.
No. 16 seed — TCU
The Horned Frogs could host the Fort Worth Regional. They are the last projected regional host with one and a half weeks left before the selection show. No team is closer to the cut line.
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