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Baseball America projects record 13 SEC teams in NCAA Tournament, 7 Regional hosts
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Baseball America believes the NCAA Tournament will be chock-filled with SEC teams, and it could be record-setting.
It projected on Wednesday a whopping 13 SEC teams to make the NCAA Tournament. The previous record for NCAA bids for a conference is 11, which the SEC just set last year. But 2025 could be the ultimate encore for a conference that prides itself on its baseball talent and history.
What’s even more impressive than the 13 projected SEC teams is that the conference is also projected to have an SEC host at 7 of the 16 Regional sites. That’s almost half of the Regional sites that could be hosted by SEC powerhouses. The projected SEC baseball party in the NCAA Tournament is eerily similar to what the conference just accomplished in basketball in getting a record 14 teams into the just-completed tournament that, by the way, was won by an SEC team in Florida.
Speaking of the Gators, they are not 1 of the 7 projected SEC Regional hosts, but they are 1 of the 13 SEC teams projected to make the NCAA Tournament. But the projected SEC Regional host roll call is headlined by SEC newcomer Texas. The Longhorns are joined on that elite list by fellow powerhouses LSU and Arkansas, with Tennessee and Georgia also being projected to host Regionals.
Auburn and Vanderbilt fill out the projected long list of SEC Regional hosts, but of course, there are more SEC teams projected to be part of the NCAA Tournament party in 2025.
Aforementioned Florida is projected to get a bid, but the Gators are on thin ice, according to Baseball America, as 1 of the Last Four In. Texas A&M and Kentucky are also projected to get NCAA bids from the SEC, along with Oklahoma and Ole Miss. Last but not least out of the SEC is Alabama, filling out the 13 teams that Baseball America believes will be playing in the NCAA Tournament.
Vanderbilt is a unique case as well, because the Commodores were projected to be a No. 2 seed last week before rising to a projected Regional host this week. On the flip side of that, Oklahoma and Ole Miss were previously projected Regional hosts who are now projected No. 2 seeds, so it’s a very fluid thing as we move closer to postseason baseball.
And after all that, there might just be 14 SEC teams in the NCAA Tournament, as Mississippi State is 1 of the projected First Four Out.
Incidentally, the non-SEC teams projected to host Regionals are: UC Irvine, Clemson, Arizona, West Virginia, UCLA, Coastal Carolina, North Carolina, Florida State and Oregon State.
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
