How did the old regionals work?

It had 8 teams and the winner went to Omaha.

ETA: My bad. 6 teams. I am a dumbass.

48 team field
8 host sites
6 teams per site
Double Elimination Tournament

8 regions with 6 teams only 48 teams made it back then

And if a game was on TV, it was a rare occasion. Jim Hawthorne was God back then.

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48 team NCAA tournament.

8 regionals, 6 teams. Double elimination.

Winner to Omaha.

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Im assuming the OP understood that. More than likely trying to understand how the second round of the regionals went with 3 winners and 3 losers and double elimination.

IIRC the highest seeded loser played the highest seeded winner.

Just looking at old brackets, it looks like one of the second round games matched a first round winner against a loser, and there were 2 different possibilities for the bracket moving forward, depending on who won that game. Seems a lot more complicated than the 4-team regionals today.

The 3rd game was the big one.

If you were the 1 seed, you played the loser of the 3/4 game in the 2nd round. The 2 seed played the 3/4 game winner.

So if the seeds held, the 1 and 2 played in the 3rd round on Saturday.

quote:

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Im assuming the OP understood that. More than likely trying to understand how the second round of the regionals went with 3 winners and 3 losers and double elimination.

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Yes exactly. Lol I did understand the basic understanding of how it worked but I was looking at some of the old brackets and it was sort of racking my brain following what happened after those initial 3 games.

If the first round winner won their second game against the loser, you ended up with 2 teams at 2-0, 2 teams at 1-1, and 2 eliminated. Then it basically played out the same as today's regionals after the first round.

If the loser won their second game against the winner though, you only had 1 team at 2-0, and 4 teams at 1-1. That sounds like a mess, and I'm not exactly sure how they sorted that out.

It worked liked this:

1996 Central I Regional

Essentially, if the 1-0 team lost to the 0-1 team, that 1-0 team just fell into a losers bracket that played the winner of a previous elimination game.

These regionals were heavily stacked for the higher seeds because you had to have lots of pitching. Even if you sailed through unbeaten, you had to win four games in four days. If you had two teams at 2-0, you had the equivalent of the current marble game, occurring on Saturday and you just needed one more win if you won the marble game.

But say you were Georgia Tech in that '96 regional and you lost before the marble game like the Jackets did on the first day. You had to win five games to win the regional, three elimination games just to get to the championship round and then you would have to beat the winner's bracket champ (LSU) twice.

The NCAA also was heavy on awarding regionals to schools that bid the most in those days. Thats's why Texas hosted even though they were a 3 with Miami as a 1. There were only eight host sites so it came down to your resumes and then financials if the resumes were close enough.