In our third installment of our D2 baseball BRacketology, four conference tournaments begin this week while the first “official” NCAA Regional Rankings are set to be released on Wednesday. As we have the past couple of weeks, we take a look at who BennettRank projects as the top teams in each region.
With an expanded field of 56 teams in the D2 baseball tournament, there’s an imbalanced number of teams in each region: the Central and Midwest regions will each send eight teams into the national tournament field, the South Central and West regions will get six berths, and the remaining four regions – Atlantic, East, South and Southeast – each get seven bids.
Accordingly, the official regional rankings will reflect the number of bids plus the next two teams for each release (ie. regions with six bids will see eight teams ranked, seven berth regions will see nine teams ranked, and eight team regions will feature 10 ranked teams in each release).
As we have for other sports, D2 baseball BRacketology will rank the top teams in each region based on BennettRank, which may not necessarily reflect the official numbers used by the NCAA’s baseball committee.
Once the rankings are set, we will adjust the brackets as necessary to account for automatic qualifiers from each conference. In a few cases, our BRacketology projections will not include teams which are transitioning into D2 and, as such, are not eligible for the NCAA tournament. We also excluded “at-large” teams whose records are below .500 as of the time of ranking.
And with that, let’s project some D2 baseball brackets, which presumes no “if necessary” games in the regional or national brackets (for simplicity purposes).
All BennettRanks and records as of April 25.
