Looking at NCAA Baseball Bracketology

The college baseball regular season has concluded and conference tournaments, including the ACC Tournament, are going to take place this week. It is plenty of teams’ last chance to either improve their resume or potentially make a magical run and earn automatic qualification for the NCAA Tournament and a chance at hoisting the College World Series trophy, and of course with an impending NCAA Tournament comes a heap of bracketology.

The Diamond Heels have had another excellent regular season, and thus their tournament fate seems relatively secure — they’ll be a top-8 seed for the third straight season. Even so, there’s fairly significant wiggle room within that range, and it’s worth knowing what UNC’s ceiling and floor might be — as well as what their brackets and future opponents might look like.

The Heels have been at a pretty consistent #2 in most industry rankings for the past month, since they beat Georgia Tech in a weekend series in Chapel Hill, and haven’t given rankers a reason to move them down, as they’ve won every weekend since then and, with the exception of an excusable loss to Coastal Carolina, have taken care of business in midweeks. Polls aren’t the same as bracket seeding, though; the committee should be relatively immune to that kind of inertia and takes into account all sorts of algorithms that might involve individual games rather than just series results, opponent and schedule quality, and margins of victory.

Most fans are probably familiar with the RPI, or Ratings Percentage Index, which has been phased out of basketball but is still in use in baseball. The RPI’s biggest flaws when it was a basketball tool are slightly less of an issue in baseball because the series reduce noise, but it’s still an imperfect metric not least because it ends up being optimal for schools to cancel late-season midweeks against low-RPI teams, because even a win can hurt your number. The last couple of years, a baseball-specific metric called DSR, or Diamond Sports Rankings, has been making a bid to replace RPI, and if softball’s selection day was any indication, it appears that DSR will be at least as big a factor as RPI to this year’s committee. DSR doesn’t punish teams for beating much lower-ranked opponents, so this would be a more than welcome replacement. There’s also ELO, borrowed from chess, and it’s also worth looking at PEARatings, which I don’t think are going to be an official tournament metric but are a pretty useful tool nonetheless — the person behind PEAR came up with the baseball version of Evan Miyakawa’s college basketball “killshot,” and it’s proliferated in the discourse this year.

UNC currently ranks 5th in RPI, 4th in ELO and PEAR, and 2nd in DSR, which means they’re ultimately in a similar spot to where they were this time last year — where they could be anywhere between the 2nd and 6th-or-so seed, depending on the whims of the committee this year. The SEC is a little weaker than it was this past year, though Georgia’s series win against Auburn this past weekend strengthens them a little. So it would seem that absent an embarrassment on Friday, the Heels should expect a top-4 overall seeding. It’s also worth noting that the committee is changing things this year as to how 2-seeds are assigned — instead of subjectively assigning them based on geography and drama, there’s now a system that will assign overall seeds 29-32 to regionals 1-4, 25-28 to 5-8, and so on.

That’s reflected in the bracketology of the moment, albeit most of it is currently still based on resumes from before this weekend and this article will doubtless be outdated within a couple hours of its publishing. D1Baseball’s latest, from May 11th, has the Heels as a 4 seed, in a region with UC Santa Barbara, Liberty, and Campbell. Baseball America has them as a 5, hosting Tennessee, UCF, and Campbell. And the 11 Point 7 bracket generator has UNC as a 3, hosting Kentucky, East Carolina, and Oral Roberts.

Campbell is a popular lower seed to put in this hypothetical Chapel Hill Regional, and it makes sense for geographical reasons. They’d be a pretty feisty 4 seed if that’s indeed how they end up placing. They won the CAA by 4 full games and have been a pesky midweek opponent for plenty of power conference squads, including wins over Duke, NC State, and Liberty. And of course, when they came to Chapel Hill, it took the Heels 14 innings to pull out the win. With a DSR of 46, an RPI of 58, and PEAR having them at 48, they’re a borderline 3-4 seed and would be one of the more popular bracket-busters wherever they ended up.

There’s not much point in analyzing the other 2 and 3 seeds that have been mocked in UNC’s region right now, but it is worth seeing who UNC would be looking at if they got out of their region. In D1, they’re across from #13 Mississippi State; in BA, they’re looking at #12 Texas A&M, and in the 11.7 bracket I generated, they’d be seeing #14 Kansas.

We’ll have a few more updates ahead of Selection Monday next week, as things are sure to change as teams win their autobids and other conference tournament action takes place.