Winning a regular season conference championship is a huge accomplishment, one that’s the product of season-long success. Taking down a conference tournament title takes a little more luck, but it’s still a notable feat.
Doing both in the same season? History says that warrants getting to host a regional in the NCAA Baseball Tournament.
Arizona’s 4-3 walkoff win over USC on Saturday night, to take the Pac-12 Tournament title, made it the 18th school among the power conferences since 2008 to win both regular-season and conference tourney crowns. Of the previous 17, 13 were selected to host regionals that year including all nine that have done so in the SEC (5), ACC (2), Big 12 (1) and Pac-12 (1), with all the “snubs” coming from the Big Ten which doesn’t have nearly the reputation for baseball as the other power leagues.
“We’re the Pac-12 regular season and tournament champion,” UA coach Chip Hale said. “I think we deserve to host.”
Seems pretty simple, right? Sadly, it’s not.
Even with those two titles, Arizona sits at 31 in the RPI entering Sunday. There are a dozen or so games left to be played, but it’s unlikely any of those results will cause the Wildcats’ rating to improve much, certainly not to the level it would need to be assured of a regional host slot.
By and large, the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee traditionally sticks closely to RPI to determine hosts. Last year none were ranked outside the top 20, and the latest projections by Baseball America and D1Baseball both mostly follow this tendency, though D1 has No. 24 Mississippi State hosting and BA has No. 22 Dallas Baptist (which plays for the Conference USA title on Sunday) among the 16 site hosts.
Most of those projected to host don’t have the distinction of sporting two titles on their resumes, however, which is why D1Baseball’s Kendall Rogers thinks a case could be made for Arizona.
“The Wildcats have the most compelling case by far … with a Pac-12 regular season and tournament title,” Rogers wrote. “However, the committee would make history by selecting a team with an RPI of 31 as a Top 16 seed. Arizona checks all the boxes … except the RPI.”
One of those boxes is nonconference strength of schedule. UA is No. 1 in that category, going 13-10 during the season against a slate that includes 16 games against teams that have qualified for the NCAA tourney or could get an at-large bid. Of the 30 teams ahead of the Wildcats in RPI, only four others are in the top 10 in NCSOS and 13 are outside the top 100 in that metric.
Earlier in the week Rogers said the committee would have to “throw a slight curveball that bucks precedent” by giving Arizona a regional spot, and doing so would no doubt cause quite an uproar. That was the case last year when the Wildcats landed an at-large bid despite a 12-18 record in Pac-12 play, with the committee citing their play down the stretch and reaching the conference tourney final as reasons to overlook the poor league mark.
And it actually wouldn’t set precedent for Arizona to get a regional, not if you go back a little more than a decade, before the committee became so married to the RPI.
The 2011 NCAA Tournament field included three schools—Oregon State (25), Texas (32) and UCLA (38)—that were hosts despite being well outside the top 16. Texas got the No. 7 overall seed, allowing it to host a Super Regional (against ASU) which it won to reach the College World Series.