College Baseball Regionals

College baseball regional playoff lineups were announced on Monday, and I'm still a little miffed. Houston got a well-deserved #1 seed, but the NCAA committee is forcing them to travel to Arizona State for the regional, where ASU will be the #2 seed.

In any other year, Houston would be hosting a regional: they have a top 8 rpi, are a consensus top 10 team in the polls, and have an excellent history of hosting. But this year, the committee decided it wanted to try to cut down travel in light of terrorist threats (surely they haven't been paying attention to Tom Ridge!), and for that reason they declined to put two regionals in Houston (three total in Texas). Since Rice is ranked higher than Houston and has a better head-to-head record, they got the "Houston" regional, and UT gets a regional for much the same reasoning.

It's kind of a raw deal that UH earns a #1 seed and, in a year that the NCAA is trying to cut travel, UH has to travel to friggin' Tempe AZ to play, without any fans.

Overall, though, the selection committee was good to C-USA, which got five teams in the tourney (the same number as an overrated Big 12 conference).

As I expected, Oklahoma State got left out of the 64-team field, and the committee basically said its 22 games against non-conference teams with an RPI ranking lower than 100 worked against them. So Tom Holliday can stop his whining and schedule some real teams next year if he wants to get OSU back on track. That is, if Tom Holliday is still the coach there next year.

[Posted at 22:38 CST on 05/29/02] [Link]