NCAA Tournament Bracket Prediction 9.0: Impact of Conference Tournaments

What a fun baseball season this has been, and the excitement and craziness will intensify from here on out. Conference baseball tournaments start tomorrow and then the NCAA Tournament will start.

We’re six days away from the field of 64 being selected. What happens in the conference tournaments could seriously shake up NCAA Tournament bracket predictions. A bubble team could go on a run or a team with little-to-no hope of making the tournament could win their conference.

That’s a nightmare scenario for bubble teams like UT Rio Grande Valley, Cal Poly or Arizona State. Let’s say, for an example, No. 19 Northeastern doesn’t win the Coastal Athletic Association tournament and College of Charleston does. Charleston would get the conference’s automatic bid, but Northeastern would still get into the tournament.

But that turned a one-bid conference into a two-bid conference and would see one of the last four teams get moved to the first four out column. Using the bracket prediction below, that would mean either Cal Poly or UTRGV wouldn’t be in the tournament.

Things like that happen all the time and are nearly impossible to predict. That’s one reason why I like using the current standings to decide the automatic qualifiers. Sometimes that exact situation happens and adds a little bit of spice into making predictions.

Speaking of making predictions, you can see my NCAA Baseball Tournament Prediction 9.0 below. I do plan on doing one after the conference tournaments are wrapped up, so be sure to check back late Saturday/early Sunday for that.

Here are a few notes and thoughts about this week’s bracket:

• The SEC leads with 13 teams in the bracket, followed by the ACC with 10, Big 12 with six and the Big Ten, Big East and Sun Belt each have three.
• If you had told me two months ago that Florida would be in line to host a NCAA Regional, I’d have tried to get admitted into a psychiatric hospital because you had clearly lost your mind. But here we are with a Gainesville Regional.
• I do really think there’s a clear-cut tier of teams that are obvious at-large teams. But once you get down to the final six or eight spots, things start to get murky. The biggest question was Arizona State, who just missed making the field, and should it get in instead of Cal Poly? Or UTRGV? This week, no, but it wouldn’t take but a couple wins in the Big 12 Tournament for that change.
• There isn't one regional that jumps out as "regional of doom" but quite a few look pretty tough on paper. As an fun exercise, I did the math to figure out the average RPI of teams in each regional and here are those results: