Texas A&M's Nick Banks is having a great season. (TAMU)

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Midseason Field Of 64 Projection

This past weekend marked the halfway point in the college baseball season, which means it’s time to update our preseason projection for the NCAA tournament field. Kendall Rogers, Aaron Fitt and Mark Etheridge debated national seeds and regional hosts in a special midseason podcast. Below is the full field of 64 they constructed.

A few notes on the field:

• We took a hybrid approach to constructing this field; it is not intended to show what the field would look like if the season ended today, but it does heavily weight the results from the first half of the season. But we also made some commonsense assumptions about how RPIs will fluctuate in the second half of the season. So, for instance, we don’t expect Dallas Baptist to finish the season ranked No. 1 in the RPI (where it is now), which is why we don’t have the Patriots as a national seed. But we think they will wind up as a host.

• The SEC leads all conferences with eight regional teams and four hosts in our projections. But the SEC is top-heavy this year, with five teams that look like sure-fire regional teams at this point, and the rest of the league a major jumble. Every team in the conference is legitimately in the hunt for a regional, but every team outside the top five has major warts. We went with Auburn as our eighth and final regional team, and also the last team into our field of 64.

• Other multi-bid conferences: ACC (six); Pac-12 and Big Ten (five); American, Big 12 and Big West (four); C-USA, Colonial, Missouri Valley and Mountain West (two). The Big 12 is No. 3 in conference RPI, but has just two clear regional teams at this point (TCU and Oklahoma State), both of whom have elite RPIs that help the conference RPI. The Big 12 also does not have any teams with horrible RPIs that drag the league down, but most of the conference is in the middling range, from 70-140. As a result, the league’s RPI is solid, but it lacks teams with regional-caliber resumes. We’re banking on Texas and Oklahoma to heat up and boost their RPIs into at-large range as the season progresses. Texas Tech is another team that could hop into that mix with a strong showing during the next few weeks.

Midseason Field of 64 Projection