2023 NCAA Tournament Projected Field of 64: Louisiana State Lands No. 1 Overall Seed (4/5/23)

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 still 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 a dose of 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 SEC again is the top-rated league in conference RPI and it gets seven hosts in this projection. That would match the conference’s own record for most hosts from one conference and is absolutely at the upper end of what’s feasible. But all seven of those projected hosts—Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana State, South Carolina, Tennessee and Vanderbilt—rank in the top 20 of RPI and the conference is showing that there might be a genuine separation between the top and bottom half, enabling teams at the upper end to pile up conference wins. Still, a team like Tennessee (21-8, 4-5) needs to get on track soon if it is to remain on the host line. 

The SEC also leads with 10 bids in this projection, which would match a record. The ACC follows with nine bids. 

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