033: Geography!
A look at the NCAA Baseball Tournament and the locations of the teams in the 16 Regionals.
The 2023 NCAA Baseball Tournament starts Friday, June 2. There are 16 regionals made up of four teams hosted at campus sites. The winners of those 16 regionals continue at campus sites next week in the Super Regionals. Eight teams advance to the College World Series that begins on June 15.
A record eight Southeastern Conference teams were selected to host a regional. The selection show referenced a geographical RPI. It’s obvious there is a bias to the southeast. At this point, I’m surprised the SEC hasn’t lobbied to put the CWS in Hoover, Alabama instead of in Omaha, Nebraska.
So, let’s put the 16 regionals on a map . . .
Full list of regionals and distances for each participant
Please note the milage listed indicates if you were to travel by air plane, not car. It’s more of a straight-line mileage, for example, the distance between Chapel Hill and Terre Haute.
Clemson is the most centrally located regional. The three regional participants - Charlotte, Lipscomb, and Tennessee - are all less than 250 miles from Doug Kingsmore Stadium.
The Coral Gables Regional features three visiting teams - Texas, Maine, and Louisiana - from a combined 3,362 miles away from Alex Rodriguez Park at Mark Light Field. Good thing Miami provides milkshakes.
The Pac-12 has only one regional host in Stanford. The four other tournament teams from the conference are traveling a combined ~6500 miles.
The Mountain West’s lone tournament team, San Jose State, has the shortest distance to a regional as the Spartans visit Stanford.
Indiana State, the Missouri Valley Conference’s lone representative, isn’t traveling at all and hosting at Bob Warn Field in Terre Haute.
The state of North Carolina has eight tournament participants. Six of those eight teams are visiting neighboring states while Wake Forest remains at home and North Carolina heads to Terre Haute, Indiana.
Six teams from the state of Texas made the NCAA Tournament. The surprise is none of these six teams are hosting a regional. Texas and Texas Tech both head to Florida, which isn’t a short trip for either school.
Santa Clara is traveling over 1,500 miles to play at Arkansas. Consider that is nearly the total sum of mileage that Auburn has traveled (~1,860 miles) in its away games this entire season.
It just means more . . . control?
A team from the SEC has won four out of the last five College World Series. Coaches in the conference make more money than some Major League Baseball managers. And eight of the 16 regional hosts are from the league.
The SEC continues to control college sports. The states with schools in the league are changing laws to launder money circumvent Name, Image, and Likeness rules. The headlines are exhausting and redundant.
The NCAA Baseball Tournament has a committee. The chair of the committee is an athletic director from a SEC school and acknowledged it’s time to revisit the RPI as the lone metric. It’s just not time right now.
Campbell was not awarded a host site despite the Camels having a better RPI than three regional hosts. The Camels bid was to host at Segra Stadium, the minor league park in Fayetteville, NC because its home stadium in Buies Creek has a capacity of 1,250.
It’s clear the RPI isn’t the only criteria to host. It’s also important to be able to sell tickets. Lots of tickets. Even if it means visiting teams are staying in dorm rooms on campus.
College baseball could do away with the RPI or add to it. There are other metrics out there today by smart people. Iterative strength rankings at Boyd’s World, RPI+ from College Baseball Nation, and ELO rankings from Warren Nolan.
The change to metrics could be lead by the SEC. The problem is the league only seems interested in behavior that brings in more money to its member schools.
It just means more control.
The map in this chart was built using the ggmap package and geosphere package to calculate the distances. You can find the code here.