2023 NCAA Tournament Projected Field of 64 (4/12/23)

College baseball has reached the halfway point of its regular season. Selection Monday is less than two months away and the postseason race is heating up.

Still, at this time of the season, there is a lot of projecting to do when building a Field of 64. This is meant to illustrate what the tournament would look like on Selection Monday, not how it would be seeded if it started tomorrow.

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 some salt. Several teams included in the field, either as hosts or with an at-large bid, have real work to do to improve their metrics over the next several weeks.

The hosting race excitingly includes several teams from outside the traditional powers. Kentucky and Boston College, two of this season’s biggest surprises, are in the top 10 of RPI and strongly in the mix to host. BC was dealt a blow last week when it was swept at Louisville and fell to 8-7 in the ACC and, at this point, piling up ACC wins is probably more important for the Eagles than their RPI, which is already impressive. Connecticut and Indiana are not listed as hosts in this projection but with top-20 RPIs they must also be considered in the mix at this juncture. Neither has much margin for error—UConn because few of its conference opponents rank even in the top 100 of RPI and Indiana because it has few high-end wins to date—but both could host, particularly if they are conference champions.

Campbell and Coastal Carolina both get hosting nods in this projection, but like UConn and Indiana, neither has much margin for error. Coastal’s elite strength of schedule (No. 10) will serve it well and playing in the Sun Belt should help it. Campbell has played a difficult schedule and has 12 wins away from home, a very impressive number for a school in the South. That will help the Camels, but the Big South ranks No. 17 in conference RPI and if they’re going to host, they’re going to have to run roughshod through the conference. For now, however, we’ll stick with Campbell as hosts.

It’s too early to really get into the tournament bubble, but we’re about at the midpoint of conference play in the ACC, Pac-12 and SEC so it is becoming easier to project conference records. In the ACC, teams typically must get to .500 in conference play, as no ACC team has earned an at-large bid with a losing conference record since 2016. In the Pac-12, a winning record is all but required, as no team has gotten an at-large bid with less than 16 Pac-12 wins since the league expanded in 2012. There’s more leeway in the SEC, but teams generally have to get to 13 conference wins to have a chance. For teams from those conferences that are sitting on the bubble, those are the numbers to watch and were key in building this field. 

Baseball America will continue to update the projected field weekly throughout the spring.