2019 College Baseball Thread

It's about that time again. The NCAA Tournament bracket is out and it's a little bit of a WTF? If seedings hold, five of the eight super regional matchups will have conference opponents going head-to-head. That includes Oregon State and UCLA, which I'm sure will please some folks around here.

Ten SEC teams got in, tying a record, and there's a good argument to be made that an 11th (Missouri) got the shaft. Four of the 10 are top-8 national seeds.
And, for the first time since 1991, Cal State Fullerton is not in the tournament.

Time to start the road to Omaha.

2019 Division I Baseball Official Bracket | NCAA.com

 

Stony Brook in the Baton Rouge regional ... hmmmm.

 

Used to think it was a travel thing - but it seems the NCAA really tries to get as many conferences to Omaha as it can with regional hosts seeded against regional hosts from their own conference. What stood out to me was a Big 10 team - Ohio State no less - in as a four seed. Surely there was a more worthy mid-major school.
And the seedings weren't strictly RPI - Oregon State was 20th in RPI - but they'll sell 4-5k in tickets.

 

Ohio State won the B1G tournament, I believe. That bounced an at-large.

 

Ole Miss was No. 22 and will sell 10,000 tickets. They had a great week in Hoover, but I'm not sure their on-field accomplishments merit a regional over a Tennessee team that was No. 14 in RPI and smacked them around two weeks ago.

 

Missouri played .333 ball (8-16-1) against Q1 opponents and had a 206 OOC strength-of-schedule. It's high RPI was more attributable to who it played (and who the SEC teams it skipped played) in conference, not how well it did. Missouri also played 25 games against Q3 and Q4 opponents. In essence, it's schedule sucked.

Okie State (2), UCLA (3) and Oregon State (8) had the top OOC SOS of the 16 seeds. Mississippi State's was 200th, it must have played no one of consequence OOC.

 

Missouri 31st in RPI. Excluded in favor of No. 59 or close to it. Pretty rare, I would suspect.

 

My bad. I forget some conferences do tournaments.

 

Yet we still have the death bracket for West Coast mid-majors at Stanford with the Cardinal, Fresno State, UC Santa Barbara and Sacramento State.

 

I guess the Big West was the conference of death. Come in first or pack up your gear. UC Santa Barbara is the only rep.
UC Irvine came in second at 37-17, 17-7. Not invited.

 

No western bubble teams (Arizona, BYU, UCI) made it, and the P5 conference runner-up, which finished 1/2-game behind the No. 1 seed, didn't get a top-8 national seed, while the fourth-place team from another league did. Surprise, surprise.