2024 NCAA Baseball Tournament Bracket: Projected Field Of 64 (March 27)
More than a month into the college baseball season, the Road to Omaha is taking shape. Most conferences have begun league play and while there’s still a lot of baseball left to be played, it’s not too early to start breaking down the postseason picture.
This is Baseball America’s first in-season Projected Field of 64 of the year. At this time of the season, the emphasis is definitely on “projected.” This is not meant to be how the tournament would be seeded if it started tomorrow. Instead, it is meant to illustrate what it might be expected to look like on Selection Monday.
RPI, the primary metric the selection committee uses to build the field, is beginning to normalize, particularly at the top end. But, overall, looking at RPI still requires a large dose of salt. At this time last year, Oregon State was No. 91, for instance.
NCAA Baseball Bracket
| PROJECTED FIELD OF 64 | ||||
| Fayetteville, Ark. | Conway, S.C. | |||
| 1. (1) Arkansas ^* | 1. (16) Coastal Carolina^* | |||
| 2. Oklahoma State | 2. Duke | |||
| 3. St. John’s* | 3. Kentucky | |||
| 4. Arkansas-Little Rock* | 4. VCU* | |||
| Clemson, S.C. | Greenville, N.C. |
|||
| 1. (2) Clemson^* | 1. (15) East Carolina^* | |||
| 2. Northeastern* | 2. North Carolina | |||
| 3. Kennesaw State* | 3. Maryland | |||
| 4. Niagara* | 4. Grand Canyon* | |||
| Corvallis, Ore. | Columbia, S.C. | |||
| 1. (3) Oregon State^* | 1. (14) South Carolina^ | |||
| 2. Kansas State | 2. NC State | |||
| 3. Portland* | 3. Campbell | |||
| 4. North Dakota State* | 4. SC-Upstate* | |||
| Tallahassee, Fla. | Dallas | |||
| 1. (4) Florida State^ | 1. (13) Dallas Baptist^* | |||
| 2. Oregon | 2. Alabama | |||
| 3. Georgia | 3. TCU | |||
| 4. Wagner* | 4. Lamar* | |||
| College Station, Texas | Winston-Salem, N.C. | |||
| 1. (5) Texas A&M^ | 1. (12) Wake Forest^ | |||
| 2. Texas | 2. Mississippi State | |||
| 3. Sam Houston State | 3. Utah | |||
| 4. Bryant* | 4. UNC Greensboro* | |||
| Charlottesville, Va. | Baton Rouge, La. |
|||
| 1. (6) Virginia^ | 1. (11) LSU^ | |||
| 2. UC Irvine* | 2. Virginia Tech | |||
| 3. West Virginia | 3. Louisiana-Lafayette | |||
| 4. Penn* | 4. Jackson State* | |||
| Knoxville, Tenn. | Gainesville, Fla. |
|||
| 1. (7) Tennessee^ | 1. (10) Florida^ | |||
| 2. Southern Miss | 2. UCF | |||
| 3. UC Santa Barbara | 3. Miami | |||
| 4. Wright State* | 4. Fresno State* | |||
| Norman, Okla. | Nashville | |||
| 1. (8) Oklahoma^ | 1. (9) Vanderbilt^ | |||
| 2. Nebraska* | 2. Indiana State* | |||
| 3. Mississippi | 3. Texas Tech | |||
| 4. Bowling Green State* | 4. Army* | |||
* denotes automatic bid
^ denotes regional host
Last Four In
UC Santa Barbara
Louisiana-Lafayette
TCU
Miami
First Four Out
California
Wichita State
Auburn
Georgia Tech
Next Four Out
Xavier
James Madison
Rutgers
Louisville
When does the NCAA baseball bracket come out?
The full field of 64 is released on Monday, May 27 at 12 p.m. ET, an event commonly referred to as “Selection Monday.” The 2024 NCAA Tournament is set to begin later that week with regionals on Friday, May 31. That sets the path to the 2024 NCAA College World Series, which begins Friday, June 14.
Some notes about the field
If you look at this week’s Top 25 and this projection, you will notice they do not align. There are a number of deviations. Most notably, Coastal Carolina is not ranked in the Top 25 but is listed here as the No. 16 overall seed.
The Top 25 and Projected Field of 64 have different purposes. The Top 25 is meant to rank how we view the 25 best teams in the country in the moment. The Projected Field of 64 is meant to be a projection of how the selection committee will build the NCAA Tournament two months from now. So, when I project Coastal Carolina to be the No. 16 overall seed here but we don’t rank them in the Top 25, the rationale is that we don’t think the Chanticleers are among the 25 best teams in the country right now but in two months time, when the committee evaluates their body of work (which we project to include a Sun Belt title), the committee will rank them 16th. Remember, the emphasis here is very much on projected.
There are 12 SEC teams in this projected field (just as there are 12 SEC teams in this week’s Top 25). To be honest, I don’t feel great about that. No conference has ever put more than 10 teams in one NCAA Tournament and that record has held for a decade now. Knowing that, I tried putting together a field with only 10 or 11 SEC teams and I actually liked that field less.
While the selection committee doesn’t care how many teams from a given conference make the tournament, it does like to see a winning conference record (which is a deviation from some other sports). More latitude is given to SEC teams in this regard, as just about every year there is at least one SEC team with a losing conference record in the field. Even so, the committee has shown no appetite for teams with fewer than 13 wins. Typically, teams that finish in the last four or five spots in the SEC standings don’t win more than a dozen conference games.
I’m uneasy predicting that either the selection committee will break precedent or that 12 SEC teams will win at least 13 conference games (and, even if they do, 13 SEC wins is no guarantee of an at-large bid, historically). But this season has started so strangely. We have 12 teams from one conference ranked in the Top 25 and if you look at other polls or metrics, that’s not an outlier. The Pac-12 and Big Ten both appear to be down, opening up at-large bids that typically go to those conferences.
The ACC and SEC are dominating the top of the sport. In time, this will all work itself out. Either the SEC will stratify and it will be easier to cut a couple bids from the league or the metrics will solidify and it will become more apparent that the selection committee will have to face the issue head on. But at this stage of the season, tournament projections are far more art than science.
The ACC and SEC’s early season dominance also creates a logjam in the hosting and top-eight seed races. This will also work itself out in time. But right now 20 teams in the Top 25 are from those two conferences and, again, that’s not an outlier. The Pac-12 is unlikely to produce a host other than Oregon State. The Big 12 looks like it’s going to follow a similar path to last season and beat itself up so much that it only ends up with one host. If that is the case, the hosting race really opens up for the ACC and SEC to gobble up 11 of the 16 regionals.
Why 11 of the 16? Because in addition to holding a regional for Oregon State and another for a Big 12 program, recent history says there will be three hosts from outside the ACC, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC. That’s part of the reason I included Coastal as a host, joining Dallas Baptist and East Carolina. Other teams from outside those conference to watch as potential hosts are Indiana State and Nebraska.
