re: Let's Rethink this whole National Seeding Thing

quote:

---

So although I hope we win the SEC Tournament, I am starting to think it might be better to not be a National Seed, history seems to agree.

---

Perhaps it means that the selection committee needs to do a better job seeding teams. They have a unapologetic agenda of "spreading the wealth." They will give a lesser team in a under-represented region of the country a national seed just to build fan and viewing interest over there.

For example, Vanderbilt won in 2014 because they got paired with national seed Indiana, who didn't even make it out of their regional. They made it to the finals in 2015, and they were paired with another shitty artificially high-rated Big Ten team (Illinois) that only got their seed because they got a gaudy record playing in a bad conference, but a conference that rarely gets represented and could potentially draw big numbers.

The other factor is that they insist on pairing national seeds with the nearest 1 seed to them instead of weighting it.

That's how Virginia won in 2015. They gave the #1 national seed to UCLA, and paired them with UCSB. West Coast baseball has largely been a dumpster fire after Arizona and UCLA won their titles, but they still get 1 seeds and play each other in the Supers. In that bracket, you had 5 California teams out of the 8 teams, and two of the other three teams were the ones who won it, and both of them were 3 seeds.

Meanwhile, last year, you're getting slugfests in the Southeast between FSU and Florida, and TCU and aTm, and any of those teams were far superior to any team in the LA and Santa Barbara regionals.

I promise you that one or two SEC teams that have earned national seeds won't get them because "that's not fair" and "that's not good for the growth of college baseball."