Mountain West (and beyond) NCAA baseball tournament projections will be new every week 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.
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.
This post will discuss current and future Mountain West and PAC-12 teams.
Baseball America
Here is Baseball America’s Road to Omada update from April 8th.
This projection features three teams that are under our blanket of coverage.
San Diego State enters the picture here, replacing Nevada as the fourth seed in the Westwood Regional (where UCLA looms). In the Corvallis region, Oregon State is the top seed (7th overall), and they are joined by Texas State in the third spot.
College Sports Madness
CSM’s latest projections are from April 2nd, so no new updates for this week.
Air Force gets the nod as the Mountain West champion, staying in the four-seed spot in the Corvallis Regional, where they are joined by top-seeded Oregon State. The Beavers are the fifteenth-best team in this projection.
Those look to be the only two teams under this umbrella featured in this bracket.
D1 Baseball
D1 Baseball has a projection from yesterday on the 14th.
Gonzaga goes to Los Angeles as the three-seed. The Austin Region has two teams, with Texas State and New Mexico as the bottom two seeds. Finally, Oregon State leads the Corvallis Region as the #7 team in the tournament.
On3 Field of 64
This round of projections went live on Monday, with Jonathan Wagner updating his thoughts on a weekly basis.
In this projection, Nevada qualifies as the fourth-best team in the Los Angeles Regional as the Mountain West champion. Then, independent Oregon State will be the one-seed in Corvallis, listed as the eighth-best team overall. Gonzaga checks in as the #3 team all the way in the Tuscaloosa Region.
Texas State has dropped out of this projection.
If anyone knows any other projection sites, feel free to share.
