With just over a week until the NCAA baseball tournament field is announced, the Oklahoma Sooners received good and bad news.
The good is that OU is locked into the postseason. Oklahoma could lose its final two regular-season games against Texas and lose in the first round of next week’s Southeastern Conference Tournament and still make the NCAAs. The Sooners may not like their seeding if that happened, but they’d be in.
Advertisement
The bad news is after Friday’s loss to the Longhorns, the chances of hosting in the NCAA Tournament are all but kaput. And finishing in the aforementioned manner might drop the Oklahoma to a regional 3-seed instead of a 2-seed. In the latest bracket projections from USA TODAY Sports, OU remains a two.
Eddie Timanus and Erick Smith released their latest projection on Thursday and placed the Sooners as the No. 2 seed in the Chapel Hill Regional, hosted by North Carolina. If such a bracket exists, Oklahoma would play former Big 12 rival Kansas State in the opener while the host Tar Heels would get Yale.
The USA TODAY Sports projections listed 13 of the 16 SEC teams in the tournament field. Another, preseason No. 1 Texas A&M was among the first four out. Vanderbilt, Tennessee, Alabama, Auburn, Georgia, Arkansas, LSU and Texas would host regionals in the projections. Oklahoma’s regional would be against national No. 8 seed North Carolina.
The Sooners will not know their NCAA Tournament fate until May 25 during the NCAA Tournament selection show. They have at least three games left until then, meaning fortunes can change, even if it’s unlikely they do.
This article originally appeared on Sooners Wire: SEC dominates NCAA baseball tournament projections