NCAA Baseball Tournament Projection: Is Vanderbilt a National Seed?

The men and women NCAA Tournaments are in full swing and everyone from bracketology experts to casual fans are realizing how hard it is to predict what will happen. But it sure is fun.

What adds to the excitement is the months of bracket predictions, identifying who’s in, who’s out, who’s on the bubble and who needs a miracle (looking at you Arkansas) to be one of the teams playing in the tournament. Nearly every college team sport has a playoff and whenever there’s a cutoff line, there will be controversy and drama around the last teams in and last teams out.

NCAA baseball is no different and the start of the NCAA Baseball Tournament is approaching on the horizon (it’s blotted out by the current March Madness, but it’s there). However, there aren’t nearly as many bracket predictions for baseball as there are for basketball. So, I figure why not throw my hat into the ring.

What follows is my best guess about what the 64-team NCAA Baseball Tournament bracket would look like if the tournament started now. So, I used the current top 25 rankings and current conference standings. I pulled the 16 national seeds from the top 25 list and then identified the current conference champions who would automatically qualify for the tournament. That left me with roughly 15 at-large bids to handout, which was not easy.

Now, before we get to the bracket, let’s understand two things: 1) This is my first attempt at this and probably some things are wrong (like I doubt Hawaii will play in an Auburn, Ala. regional), but it’ll improve; and 2) A lot of this will change. There’s still a lot of games left to be played and some of the current conference leaders won’t be leading in the end.

With those disclaimers done, here’s my NCAA Baseball Tournament Projection 1.0:

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