094: NCAA Baseball Regionals by the numbers
Odds to win each regional, plus numerical rankings across various metrics.
The road to Omaha starts Friday, May 31. If you think the NCAA Basketball Tournament has lots of variance, the NCAA Baseball tournament format is an absolute crapshoot.
A sport that requires play almost every day determines a champion in about a month using multiple elimination formats.
There are 16 Regionals hosted at campus sites. Four teams in each regional compete in a double-elimination format. The winner of the regional advances to the Super Regionals.
The purest format of the tournament is the Super Regionals. A total of 16 teams advance to a best-of-three series format hosted by the higher seed. The winner of the Super Regional advances to Omaha.
The College World Series is a double-elimination format of eight total teams. Two teams are left after the elimination play, and those two teams play a best-of-three series to determine the National Champion.
Here is a breakdown of all 16 Regional sites and various numbers or metrics for you to get an idea of the draw for each team. The metrics for each regional include:
overall record and win percentage
odds to win regional (these are converted to probability, for example -100 would equal 50%, data is from DraftKings)
DSR: Diamond Sports Ranking developed by 643charts.com. This is a new metric that follows Elo methodology. You can see the current rankings on d1baseball.com and read more about the methodology here1.
WAB: remember wins-above-bubble? How could you forget after this basketball season? This is a résumé metric that reflects how many more (or fewer) games a team has won against its schedule than a bubble-quality team would be expected to win against that same schedule. Seth Burn computed it for baseball using Massey Ratings, and it’s a bit alarming based on some teams left out of the field.
RPI: rating power index from the NCAA. Tried-and-true, and flawed. You can find the current ratings here.
There are four separate tables, grouped by the potential Super Regional and College World Series pairings.
Tallahassee, Greenville, Knoxville, and Norman
Duke and Wake Forest are both favored to win their respective regionals despite having to do so on the road (Duke at Oklahoma, Wake Forest at ECU).
Tennessee has the best odds (~74%) to advance to the Super Regionals. The Vols are the number one overall seed for a reason.
Oral Roberts has the worst record of the field. The Golden Eagles won ~47% of its games this past season and earned the automatic bid from the Summit League.
Athens, Raleigh, Lexington, and Corvallis
South Carolina is narrowly favored ahead of host NC State in the Raleigh Regional.
Indiana State is a two seed in Lexington, but the Sycamores own a higher RPI than the one seeds in Corvallis and Raleigh (NC State and Oregon State).
UNC Wilmington’s WAB is quite low. There is a good chance the Seahawks would not be in the tournament without its CAA Tournament win.
Tucson, Chapel Hill, Fayetteville, and Charlottesville
Tucson is a competitive regional with host Arizona and two seed Dallas Baptist showing equal odds to advance to a Super Regional.
Both North Carolina and Virginia welcome strong two seeds from the SEC (LSU, Mississippi State), and both two seeds have better than a 40% chance to advance.
Grand Canyon is a for profit university2.
Clemson, Stillwater, College State, and Santa Barbara
Grambling is one game below .500. Automatic bids are fun, and the tattoos prove it.
Clemson welcomes the strongest two seed across these four regionals as Vanderbilt ranks in the top 20 of DSR, WAB, and RPI.
Niagara is the four seed in Stillwater, but owns the highest win percentage of amongst all four of the regional participants3.
Working for the bubble
A record 11 SEC teams earned a bid to the tournament. Five ACC teams were selected for a host bid to match the SEC too.
A leagues grow to consolidate power, it’s making the tournament selection process with a committee even more silly. Bubble teams had members on the committee, and those teams got in.
Several teams had legitimate gripes with missing out on an at-large bid. Wins-above-bubble for baseball is a bit tricky because it’s hard to factor in starting pitchers4 and adjust for schedule strength.
Using the WAB rankings, you find schools like Cal and TCU in the top 35 of the WAB rankings, yet those teams missed out on an at-large bid. While teams like Indiana (77th), Coastal Carolina (59th), and James Madison (61st) earned an at-large.
College of Charleston was the highest ranked team (25th) in DSR left out of the field. The Cougars were rated lower in WAB (44th) and RPI (42nd). It’s clear the only way Charleston would earn a bid was to win the CAA Tournament.
While conference tournaments are super important for smaller leagues, it’s hard to make a case that those same league tournaments are meaningful for the power leagues.
Duke’s résumé is likely better than East Carolina, especially after winning the ACC Tournament. The automatic bid doesn’t translate into an automatic host though. You need actual facilities in order to host.
What if smaller leagues eliminated conference tournaments and relied on the regular season champion to receive an automatic bid instead?
Who knows.
I’m confident another team would find a gripe with that process too. It also feels like its past time to try something different to combat the leagues where it just means more.
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While I didn’t publish a post last week, I put together a table to enter the 2024 Posit Table Contest. You can find the code for that contest entry here and the code of the tables in this post here.
Enjoy the baseball this weekend.
DSR is computed for both baseball and softball. It’s intended to be predictive, and here is a good explainer on how it compares to the RPI.
Strength of schedule and strength of record are two entirely different things.
When Chase Burns pitches for Wake Forest, the Demon Deacons are a lot tougher opponent.