NCAA Baseball Tournament: UCLA Makes Auburn Regional, Will Face Florida State

The Bruins and Seminoles will battle to see who can take on the hosting Tigers and advance through the national bracket.

The Bruins have found out where their road to Omaha will begin.

Early Monday morning, UCLA baseball (38-22, 19-11 Pac-12) learned its postseason fate on the NCAA Baseball Championship Selection Special. The blue and gold were unable to earn a national seed, but will open up their journey as the No. 2 team in the Auburn Regional for their fifth-straight tournament bid.

Joining UCLA in the region are the hosts, No. 14 overall seed Auburn, as well as Florida State and Southeastern Louisiana. The Bruins will open the regional against the Seminoles on Friday, while the Tigers and Lions will begin things on the other side of the regional bracket.

In the standard double-elimination format, the winners of the opening two games will face off Saturday with a spot in the Regional Finals on the line, while the losers will have to claw their way out of the loser’s bracket.

All regionals will begin Friday, and first pitch between UCLA and Florida State is scheduled for 9 a.m PST, or noon local time.

Auburn finished fourth in the SEC West with a 16-13 record within the conference, however, the Tigers’ 37-19 overall record was enough to guarantee them a hosting opportunity.

The Seminoles were squarely on the bubble heading into Monday having lost five of their final six games ahead of the bracket reveal, and they were officially part of the Last Four In. Still, Florida State’s 33-23 finish secured a No. 3 seed in the tournament.

Southeastern Louisiana is the only member of the Auburn Regional to have won its conference tournament. The Lions played eight games in the Southland Conference Tournament and defeated McNeese State in a three-game series to secure an NCAA tournament bid.

UCLA has the most wins out of the four teams in its region and was playing until the final day to try and win a share of the Pac-12 regular season title. A handful midweek losses dinged their RPI, though, and they finished ranked No. 48 compared to Auburn’s No. 14.

The Bruins, Seminoles and Tigers hold similar recent history with regular tournament appearances and occasional visits to the College World Series. The latter two have both been to Omaha since the blue and gold won it all in 2013, while UCLA is still trying to get back to college baseball’s grandest stage for the first time in nearly a decade.

The Lions, on the other hand, have never made it to a Super Regional and have been selected to the tournament for just the sixth time in the program’s 38-year history.

The winner of the 2022 Auburn Regional will face off against the winner of the Corvallis Regional, which boasts Pac-12 foe Oregon State, recent two-time national champion Vanderbilt, San Diego and New Mexico State. The winner of that Super Regional will head to Omaha for the College World Series.

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