The Carolinas sent six teams to the US Open Cup in 2017 — the most wonderful tournament in the world — as the PDL’s Charlotte Eagles, Carolina Dynamo, and SC United Bantams joined automatic qualifiers North Carolina FC, Charlotte Independence, and Charleston Battery. As the PDL and NPSL regular seasons approach a conclusion, it’s worth taking a look at which Carolina teams are in good position to qualify for the 2018 Open Cup… and which are not.

First, let’s take a quick glance at how the NPSL and PDL determine its Open Cup participants. Right off the bat, we have to deal with a fairly significant assumption: that both leagues will use the same process they did last year. There’s always a possibility that a league like the NPSL, who failed to record a single win over a pro team for the second straight year and had no 3rd-round participants, would want to shake things up.

But they would probably sooner do away with the region-based ranking list than scrapping their AQ/at-large model. For the 2017 Open Cup, the eight playoff quarterfinalists were guaranteed entry while the rest of the NPSL teams were ranked on a fairly complicated list that took into account region, points per game, and goal differential. The full explanation (which I wrote about a year ago) can be found here if you’re interested.

In short, you should do your best to make the NPSL Quarterfinals. But if you can’t, you’ll probably need a minimum of 1.75 points per game to be considered for the Open Cup. Memphis City, at 1.7, barely missed the cut last year and their bid was bolstered by Myrtle Beach’s departure to the PDL.

You need 21 points from 12 NPSL regular season games to get to 1.75. Some quick math shows that, unfortunately, Asheville’s maximum point total is 23. So their at-large bid isn’t entirely ruled out, but it will be difficult.

Of course, if Asheville manages to top the Southeastern Conference AND a Southeastern Conference team fails to make the NPSL quarterfinals (I told you the NPSL process was complicated), they’d still get in too. With just three games left and a five-point deficit to make up on Atlanta, it’s possible, if unlikely.

So Asheville — and FC Carolina United, who aren’t yet entirely eliminated from playoff contention, but they’d need to get hot fast — would need to win four playoff games to qualify. Obviously Asheville’s path gets somewhat easier if they manage to overtake Knoxville and thus host that playoff game. But after that would likely come road games to Atlanta and the West Division winner (possibly Chattanooga, who’s made the NPSL Quarterfinals every year since about 1900) to win the Southeastern Championship. And then they’d have to win one more game against another South Region champion, the winner of either the Heartland or Lonestar Conference.

It’s a difficult road to be sure, but it’s doable. New Jersey Copa FC made a similar journey from the 6-seed all the way to the NPSL Quarterfinals, knocking out the professional New York Cosmos B side along the way.