Lost in an offseason slog, dreaming of those fall afternoons spent arguing online about the existence of an SEC bias? Don’t worry, the NCAA baseball tourney has your fix!
No conference in tournament history has ever earned more than three of the available eight national seeds (which means you get to host the first two rounds at your home park), but the SEC looks poised to do so when the bracket is announced on Monday. Seven teams were already named regional host sites on Sunday, the most from a single conference in tournament history. Texas A&M, Florida and Mississippi State are locks for national seeds, while a fourth spot will likely go to either LSU, Ole Miss or South Carolina.
It’s not just that the SEC is really damn good — the conference boasts seven teams that won at least 40 games this season — it’s that the other Power 5 conferences, with the exception of the ACC, are really damn underwhelming. The Pac-12, usually a hotbed of championship contenders, has been excruciatingly mediocre; the only elite team in the Big 12 is conference champ Texas Tech (which will earn a national seed); the Big 10 rarely fields teams worth mentioning in the title hunt, and that’s no different this year.
The ACC isn’t as top-heavy as the SEC, but it’s actually deeper top to bottom, a notion supported by its No. 1 RPI conference rank. The conference landed six regional sites, including Miami and Louisville, which are locked in as national seeds. Clemson made a case for a third spot by winning the conference tournament on Sunday. The Tigers’ resume is comparable to those of the three SEC teams fighting for a national seed, but the presiding notion is that the selection committee would prefer a third ACC team to a fifth SEC team.
“Don’t start looking at how many teams we have from this league,” advised Ole Miss head coach Mike Bianco, whose team might be the odd man out if the conference is capped at four national seeds. “They don’t do that in basketball. They take the best teams. I don’t know why this is a conversation. It shouldn’t be … my hope is those ten people in Indianapolis try to pick the best 64, the best 16, and then the best eight.”
The decisions revealed in Monday’s selections show will be a fascinating case study on the committee’s reliance on precedence and regional diversity. Either way, we’ll get to see a bunch of angry people tweetin’ ’bout the SEC in all caps.
Ah, feels like November already.
How to watch the selection show
Time: Noon ET
TV: ESPNU
Online: WatchESPN
Here are the 16 regional sites that were announced on Sunday
The committee won’t seed these until the selection show, so we’ll just list them in alpha order for now.
- Baton Rouge, La. – LSU
- Charlottesville, Va. – Virginia
- Clemson, S.C. – Clemson
- College Station, Texas – Texas A&M
- Columbia, S.C. – South Carolina
- Miami, Fla. – Miami
- Fort Worth, Texas – TCU
- Gainesville, Fla. – Florida
- Lafayette, La. – Louisiana-Lafayette
- Louisville, Ky. – Louisville
- Lubbock, Texas – Texas Tech
- Nashville, Tenn. – Vanderbilt
- Oxford, Miss. – Ole Miss
- Raleigh, N.C. – N.C. State
- Starkville, Miss. – Mississippi State
- Tallahassee, Fla. – Florida State
