7 SEC teams in Super Regionals
- Thread starter Heelacious2315
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No question they are a very strong confidence in the major sports & they have loaded up with strong schools in recent years.
I am disappointed that the ACC has not shown better in the the Regionals &, of course, the biggest one to fail is Georgia Tech, regular season champs & tournament champs, #2 nationally.
Thankful we are still in it but watching USC last night, they look really good right now, when it counts most. We are going to have to be at our best on the mound & at the plate. Go Heels!!!
I am disappointed that the ACC has not shown better in the the Regionals &, of course, the biggest one to fail is Georgia Tech, regular season champs & tournament champs, #2 nationally.
Thankful we are still in it but watching USC last night, they look really good right now, when it counts most. We are going to have to be at our best on the mound & at the plate. Go Heels!!!
Tbf, it would have been really hard for like 5 of those to lose their regional. Auburn, Miss St, Texas, Bama, and UGA all had really easy regionals
They also had 5 lose. And Auburn and Oklahoma were very fortunate.
The ACC has been very good in the tournament for a long time in baseball no doubt a bad showing thus far but we can get to Omaha and save some face for the league. FSU , UVA and State had bad injuries that set them back and it caught up with them. GT I still can't believe lost and Wake again got a really bad draw with UK having that one elite pitcher. The ACC definitely fell on its face .
The ACC had 5 teams in super regional play in 24 and 4 last year. This is by far the worst showing in the round in over 30
Years but in all fairness FSU, UVA and State were hit badly with injuries.
Years but in all fairness FSU, UVA and State were hit badly with injuries.
Hilarious to me that ACC Network only has one team to talk about all week. They just keep playing the ECU games over and over again lol.
With the new "success initiative".. I "THINK" we get the lions share of the money, BUT... baseball is non revenue- so I doubt we get a lot even if we did make Omaha.
If we are honest and objective it is happening across all the major men’s sports - ACC is suffering “ death by a thousand cuts” - the P2 are pounding the rest of college sports into submission with the help of FOX and ESPN- have yet to see one thing on ESPN college baseball scroll about UNC - all SEC , which they have no doubt earned but there are others
Baseball still has a good amount of parity - not sure that’s what’s happening here. Legitimately just bad injury luck for a handful of acc teams and an all time collapse (mediocre pitching hiding behind a flashy offense) by GT. We are just two years removed from the ACC having four teams in Omaha.
The SEC is playing a different sport than the ACC is, in all 3 sports honestly. They've left the ACC in the dust.
It might seem that way if you believe the world only started in 2026 and ignore last year and the year before.
Forget 2026 even. The SEC has won the NCAA tournament in baseball in 2025 (LSU), 2024 (Tennessee), 2023 (LSU), 2022 (Ole Miss), 2021 (Mississippi State), (2020 was canceled due to COVID), and 2019 (Vandy). ACC has won 1 national championship in like the last 70+ years.
And with each passing year, the gap between the SEC and Big Ten and everybody else is widening. Less so with the Big Ten in baseball because the Big Ten schools stink at baseball from a geographic standpoint (there is not good baseball in the Midwest), but the ACC can't keep up with the SEC and Big Ten overall.
It's vitally important for UNC to get to the SEC as soon as possible if we want to compete for championships. As someone said above, "first train smoking"
So did Georgia Tech and Florida State (once Coastal was out) yet they found ways to lose.
I’m not going to defend the ACCs performance, i’m just putting it in context that a lot of those SEC teams had cakewalks
One of the reason those regionals seemed easy is because once you get past the SEC host teams themselves, plus about 3 ACC teams who also hosted (UNC, GT, FSU) and 3 Big Ten teams who hosted (UCLA, Nebraska Oregon), there just aren't that many good teams left in the country who sound that scary when judging the strength of a regional. Generally, the toughest draws in the country for host teams are SEC teams who come in as 2/3 seeds. That's a beast UNC often has to worry about (see LSU, Oklahoma, Tennessee the last three years), whereas for the SEC hosts, they can't draw SEC 2/3 seeds since there can't be but 1 SEC team in a given regional.
So instead....
Auburn draws NC State and UCF
Miss State draws Cincinnati and Louisiana
Texas draws UCSB and Tarleton State
Bama draws Oklahoma State and USC Upstate
UGA draws Boston College and Liberty
All of those teams seem weak compared to SEC 2/3 seeds, because, well, they are. None of those teams mentioned above are as good as Arkansas, Ole Miss, Tennessee, Kentucky, etc. who were 2/3 seeds from the SEC that struck some fear into the host schools in other regionals.
My point is, you're right that those regionals you listed were easy, and generally the reason the regionals were easy is because the host school was the only SEC team in the regional. Whereas in all the perceived "difficult" regionals, it's because you had a non-SEC host school (someone who is good!) plus an SEC 2/3 seed who is a hell of a lot stronger than NC State or Liberty or whoever else.
Well i think NC state would have been if not for the injuries and same with UVA . BC looked like a host team throughout April and after examn break they just fell apart. The SEC has been really weird this tournament to me. aTm and the Gators getting blasted by teams out the losers bracket and UK and OU playing the way they did was very surprising to me but again anyone in the tournament can get hot so all you gotta get is a shot.
Even including this horrible year, the ACC has placed 10 teams in the CWS of 24 total the last three years.
Look, I am not arguing that the SEC isn’t better or that the ACC is equal, but the statement that the SEC is playing an entirely different game is farcical.
That really hasn’t born out the last 3 years or so before this year.
2023-2025, ACC had 14 teams seeded 2 or 3, 4 of those moved on. 3 of which were over SEC teams just last year. In those 3 years the SEC had 13 teams seeded 2 or 3, only 1 moved on and that was Florida beating oklahoma state.
So, yes the SEC is having a much better year, but this would maybe look a hell of a lot different if NC state still had 2 healthy pitchers and James ramsey wasn’t an idiot. It’s not some fait accompli which you always make it seem, we get enough slurping of the SEC from every other baseball source, we do not have to also contribute
Don’t forget that State got robbed of a Natty the year they got Covid. At least that is what they tell me.
There's no doubt the ACC has been the second best baseball conference for a long time. That could be shifting soon with some good west coast schools now in the Big Ten, but for now I'm still fine if people want to say the ACC has a grasp on being the second best baseball conference. I think that's the consensus and I would agree.
But it's not close between the ACC and the SEC in baseball. Hasn't been for a while, certainly isn't now, and the gap is only going to continue to widen. UNC and GT can compete with any SEC schools, but there are a handful of schools in the ACC who couldn't compete in the SEC.
Not to mention, schools like UNC/UVA/FSU/Clemson will be leaving the ACC in the next few years, and those are the 4 best baseball programs in the league. The reason those 4 universities know they have to get out is because the SEC (and Big Ten) are lapping the field, not specifically in baseball but in college sports as a whole.
I guess this opinion boils down to your interpretation of the word "close."
Here is the link to conference RPI at Warren Nolan, and you can change year in the address bar:
Conference RPI - 2026 College Baseball | WarrenNolan.com
2026 College Baseball Conference RPI (Rating Percentage Index): A Ranking of Every Conference Based on the Average RPI of the Teams in Each Conference
What you'll see is that virtually every year, the conference RPI goes 1. SEC, 2. ACC, 3. Big12. The delta between the SEC and the ACC is almost the same as the delta between the ACC and the Big12, with a few digits here and there every year.
So, if it is not "close" between the SEC and the ACC, then it is equally not close between the ACC and the Big 12.
That's right. If you fill the field with your horses--in a game like baseball--one of them is far more likely to win. That is a fact well known by the SEC, as well by its "Little Brother," the NCAA Committee.
7 out of 12 does not prove superiority. Instead, it proves slightly better than average luck.
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And you won't see anything about Carolina on ESPN--unless we win the whole enchilada.
If you keep stacking the deck, you're going to win more often than not.
What exactly does that prove?
FSU lost, IMO, because the 'Noles held Mendez out of Game 1 to face CCU's best pitcher. That would not have happened if the NCAA's declared preference for "regional proximity" had actually applied to SEC teams.
Coastal should have been the #2 in Athens. But that would have presented the same problem for UGa that FSU failed to solve. And the "Committee" just could not abide that.
The way that the "Committee" fills the seeded sites is an unvarnished crock--plain and simple--and I have never seen anyone effectively defend it.
It's not set up like men's basketball. UNC didn't report any NCAA distributions for baseball in 2023-24, which was the last time the team reached Omaha. The CWS is a revenue engine for Omaha, but there's not much else that filters down to the membership.
It's been 15 years or so, but I wrote a story during the glory years run about a strange correlation in how UNC was losing more money the longer it stayed in Omaha due to the travel costs involved.
The success initiative is built around football and men's basketball, with football being king. For example, the viewership initiative is structured as 75% football and 25% men's basketball.
Coastal should not have been the #2 in Athens. You love to spout these conspiracy theories but you don't seem to understand the way the bracketing principles worked this year. It's not primarily based on regional proximity.
As the #3 overall seed, Georgia was guaranteed to have their 2-seed be someone ranked #29-32, which was the range Boston College fell in.
As the #10 overall seed, FSU was guaranteed to have their 2-seed be someone ranked #21-24, which was the range Coastal Carolina fell in.
Georgia 100% earned their top-3 seed and they deserved to have an easier 2-seed than Florida State. Coastal Carolina was ahead of Boston College in the pecking order and should've been. Coastal Carolina was too good to go to Athens. Coastal should not have been in the #29-32 group, which would've been required for them to end up in Athens. With Coastal being in the #21-24 group, the 4 host schools they were potentially paired up with were #9 Southern Miss, #10 Florida State, #11 Oregon or #12 Texas A&M. And for Coastal, #9 Southern Miss was off the table because they're in the same league. So for Coastal it had to be either FSU, Oregon or Texas A&M. If you want to say they should have sent Coastal to an SEC school's regional, you should be using Texas A&M as your example and not Georgia.
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yeah my emphasis was on "think" because I did not know... But the more salient point was that... being baseball... the revenue will so menial that it wouldn't amount to much of anything.
It would be interesting to find out... when Non revenue sports teams do create "revenue"... how is it divvied? Key word being "revenue".. not Profit. Because there isn't any profit for any sports besides the 2 you named above.
Coastal couldn’t be the 2 in Athens. The 2 in Athens had to be seeded between 29 and 32. This principle is very public knowledge.
But nice excuse for them losing to St John’s twice.
My understanding is that it’s school specific. The NCAA cuts checks to schools for total distribution of all revenue share and the schools parse it out from there.