College Baseball Tournament Projections: April 1st

Welcome to a new post centered around projections for the NCAA baseball tournament, leading up to the College World Series. This seems like the natural step to continue our baseball coverage, and mirrors the bowl projections and bracketology we do with our football and basketball coverage, respectively. As the conference schedule continues, we are getting closer to the baseball postseason.

For those who aren’t familiar, 64 teams make the “Road to Omaha”, which is the nickname for the NCAA Baseball Tournament that starts around the end of May. It starts with the regional rounds, with four teams in each of the sixteen regions. They play a double-elimination mini-tournament to advance to the next round. The next round is the super regionals, where the sixteen teams play a best-of-three series, with eight advancing to the College World Series in Omaha. Those teams are once again put into a double-elimination bracket to determine a champion.

The 64 teams are chosen similarly to the NCAA Basketball Tournament. Each conference tournament champion automatically qualifies, accounting for 29 bids, leaving room for 35 at-large bids. It appears there was a change in how the 64 teams are seeded, with a committee ranking the top 32 teams. Numbers 1-16 all get 1-seeds, 17-32 get 2-seeds, but two teams from the same conference can’t be in the same region.

At this point in the season, tournament projections are not being updated with any regularity, so this initial post has a wide range of projections, stretching from preseason to mid-March.

This post will discuss current and future Mountain West and PAC-12 teams.

Baseball America did a preseason bracket projection of the Road to Omaha, and updated things on March 26th.

This projection features two teams that are under our blanket of coverage.

Nevada is the fourth seed in the Westwood Regional, and they would draw a tough group with the overall top seed of UCLA.

Over in the Corvallis region, Oregon State is the first seed and fourteenth-ranked team.

This site also has a March 26th projection. The links at the bottom from previous years indicate that they will update their projections every week or so going forward.

Air Force gets the nod as the Mountain West champion, and the Falcons have been hot as of late. That gives them the four-seed in the Corvallis Regional, where they are joined by top-seeded Oregon State.

Those look to be the only two teams under this umbrella featured in this bracket.

This is a preseason bracket, but another site that looks like it will provide more frequent updates in the second half of the season.

They have Dallas Baptist as the second-best team in the Los Angeles Region. Then, Oregon State is at the top of Corvallis, and Gonzaga is at the bottom out of the WCC. Nevada is the Mountain West representative, traveling to Knoxville as the fourth-seed.

This is the most recent round of projections, published on Monday, and it appears that Jonathan Wagner will be updating this post on a weekly basis.

In this projection, Dallas Baptist is in the Tuscaloosa Regional as a three-seed as one of the Last Four In. Future PAC-12 team Texas State is also a three-seed, but they are in the Gainesville Regional. Gonzaga also makes the tournament as the automatic qualifier from the West Coast Conference, coming in as the #4 team in Tempe.

Then, Nevada qualifies as the fourth-best team in the Los Angeles Regional from the Mountain West, and independent Oregon State will be the one-seed in Corvallis.

If anyone knows any other projection sites, feel free to share.

College Baseball Tournament Projections: April 1st

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