College baseball postseason talk
SEBaseball.com’s Mark Etheridge has released his latest NCAA regional projections, which can be found here. As you can see, all three of the teams we cover on a semi-regular basis at the News & Advance are included once again, and it’s looking quite feasible that all three will indeed play postseason baseball.
Here’s a quick look at all three schools:
VIRGINIA
Record: 39-9
RPI: 4
Projection: No. 1 seed, Charlottesville Regional, No. 3 overall seed; first opponent—James Madison
Outlook: The Cavaliers are safely in and are purely playing for seeding at this point. UVa will almost certainly host a regional and if they continue as a top-8 team, they would be in line to host a best-of-three super regional as well. Virginia hosts a three-game series and travels to Miami, along with mid-week games against VCU (today) and VMI (next week) at home. If the Cavs take two of three in both of the ACC series, they should feel pretty safe about being a Top 8 seed.
VIRGINIA TECH
Record: 32-14
RPI: 23
Projection: No. 2 seed, Norwich regional; first opponent—Michigan
Outlook: The Hokies have done enough to feel pretty secure at this point. They took two out of three from Georgia Tech, Florida State and Miami and won once in Charlottesville against the Cavaliers. They host Duke and travel to North Carolina to close out the regular season and play Davidson (today and May 18) and two games against Savannah State at home in non-conference play. Only a complete collapse (i.e. getting swept by Duke and Carolina) would put Tech in danger.
LIBERTY
Record: 33-12
RPI: 46
Projection: No. 3 seed, Charlottesville regional; first opponent—Stanford
Outlook: Good, right now at least. The 16-7 win today at George Mason was huge, as Liberty has struggled offensively in midweek games of late. Liberty hosts Maryland Wednesday and absolutely has to win that game, because the Terps are ranked 140th in the RPI and a loss would be a disaster. The Flames travel to Charleston Southern this weekend to take on the Buccaneers, ranked 129th in the RPI. Then comes next week’s giant series with RPI No. 6 Coastal Carolina. If the Flames can snag one from Coastal and win five out of the six games against CSU and Winthrop, Liberty will be close to a lock. Coach Jim Toman is convinced that 40 wins will be enough to get the team in, and that means Liberty has to go at least 7-4 the rest of the way. For reference, there are five teams in Etheridge’s projection that are at-large No. 3 seeds that have lower RPIs than Liberty—Kansas State (No. 47), Washington (No. 48), Washington State (No. 54), Georgia Southern (No. 55) and Southern Mississippi (No. 66).
Posted by Chris Lang at 04:50 PM. Filed under: main •
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