NCAA Baseball
Super Post-Season
By: Colin Lacy
TheSouthernSportsEdition.com news services
For college baseball fans, this is the best time of year…College Baseball Postseason!
College baseball postseason is structured a little differently than most other sports in college athletics but has become one of the most entertaining postseasons recently.
This week (May 20 thru May 26) is the week for most league’s conference tournament.
Following “Championship Sunday” where most leagues will have the championship game, there’s a dead period of about 18 hours or so that leave teams convincing themselves (or sometimes sweating it out) that they will hear their name on Selection Monday.
At high noon on Memorial Day, the college baseball world will be locked into the selection show to wait on which 64 teams will head to an NCAA Regional.
Since 1999 when the tournament expanded to 64 teams, NCAA Baseball has structured the postseason with ranking the top 16 national seeds and those 16 teams will “host” a Regional at their home ballpark and welcome in three other teams determined by the NCAA selection committee.
With the 31 Division I conferences each receiving one “automatic bid”, that leaves 33 at-large bids up for grabs that are also selected by the committee. Most of the 31 auto-bids are given to the conference tournament champions.
Once the field of 64 is set, and the Regionals are determined, the top 16 national seeds will host the NCAA Regionals Friday May 31st through Sunday June 3rd. The Regionals are a miniature double elimination tournament between the four teams assigned to that Regional site. The winner of each Regional advances to the Super Regional round.
With just one team advancing out of each Regional, the field quickly gets trimmed from 64 to 16 over one weekend. When the Regionals are set, two Regionals are paired together (#1-seed & #16-seed paired, #2-seed & #15-seed paired and so-on) and the winner from each of those regionals will face off in the Super Regional which will be hosted at the higher ranked team’s park. With the field cut down and only 8 Super Regionals going on, this round consists of a best-of-3 game series.
If you’re one of the eight teams lucky enough to win a Super Regional, it’s time to head to the college baseball mecca…Omaha, Nebraska.
Now to the casual fan, Omaha, Nebraska may not sound majestic, but to a college baseball player, coach, fan….broadcaster….it is the “Magical Land of Oz of College Baseball.”
Since 1950, Omaha has been the destination on the mind of every college baseball team as the host of the College World Series.
From 1950 until 2010, Rosenblatt Stadium was the site for the CWS before moving in 2011 to Charles Schwab Field (formerly TD Ameritrade Park).
Make no mistake, no matter the stadium, no matter the year, Omaha is the perfect site for the grand finale to college baseball.
Each of the 8 Super Regional winning teams will flock to Omaha and be embarrassed with open arms from the community that treats this event like Christmas.
The Omaha area essentially is laser focused with everything that isn’t around the College World Series and serving the visitors shutting down.
The college baseball postseason may seem odd and somewhat drawn out to casual fans, but to baseball fans, it’s an almost month-long celebration of another season of the game so many love…College Baseball.
