College Baseball Nation, College World Series Bracket For Fun
If not for the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic the attention of college baseball teams and fans would be trending toward Omaha as conference tournaments would have concluded last weekend and the regionals would begin this week, but that's not the case.
Without actual college baseball, fans of teams are left to ponder the what if's of a season that ended far too soon. So in the spirit of cooperation and fun, the folks at College Baseball Nation shared a hypothetical bracket, though it likely contains the majority of the teams that would have made up the real field anyway and we thought it would be worth sharing.
In this bracket, it's no surprise that the SEC fielded six of the 16 host teams for first-round games. Top seed Ole Miss, followed by No.2 Florida, No.6 Vanderbilt, No.10 Georgia, No. 11 Mississippi State, and No.12 Arkansas from the SEC open at home as top-16 seeds.
LSU< Auburn, Tennessee, and Texas A&M occupy the four of the 16 two seeds and round out the SEC teams in the field as both Alabama and South Carolina found themselves in the first tour out.
Of the 64 teams in this field, 10 call the Southeastern Conference home, proving once again that like football, the SEC is top-to-bottom the best baseball conference in the land. That's not to say that an SEC team would have taken the title had the season played to its conclusion, but there is no denying the strength of the league.
According to the bracket which lists automatic qualifiers from conference champions, it was the Ole Miss Rebels who took home the crown in Hoover. One could surmise from the seedings that Florida finished second and the Commodores third in the conference based on their national seeding.
Which team would have captured the title in Omaha?
That's the fun part, it's truly anyone's guess as to how the Regionals, Super Regionals, and ultimately the College World Series would have played out.
What we do know is that we're all being deprived of seeing it for real, and that might be the only thing fans of these 64 teams will ever agree on.
A 29 year veteran of radio in the Middle Tennessee area and 16 years in digital and internet media having covered the Tennessee Titans for Scout Media and TitanInsider.com before joining the Sports Illustrated family of networks.