One of four SEC schools to host: LSU, UK, UF and us.
And Houston gets a regional, with the Fallopians to follow
As one person on NCAA baseball site said the seating capacity at these host schools is a joke ONLY LSU and Arkansas are 10K or above. NCAA ought to do as they did for host in basketball final 4 which I believe they set at 25K is to say if your stadium capacity is less than 6K in 5 years we shall have the right to move it elsewhere! It will never happen but it would make some AD’S put money in baseball not just basketball and football!
Arkansas and LSU are two of the only teams that have capacities above 10,000. I think Ole Miss and Mississippi State are the only others.
I have no problem with how regional sites are chosen. If you win enough games you shouldn’t be punished for not having a large stadium. The demand for college baseball is small in most markets.
You look at the ballparks in the Pac 12, which has two national seeds. None of them are very big, kinda like old George Cole Field. AZ State is the biggest at 8,700, several are 3,000 or so. Matt is right. Outside the SEC, nobody would ever need 10,000 seats. Moo U is about to go to 15,000 or so in Stankvomit, which I’m sure will goad both LSU and us into further expansion. Ours is already on the drawing board, not sure about LSU.
I doubt Arizona State comes close to filling its home games. That stadium is a minor league spring facility that the Sun Devils moved into when the Athletics left it in 2014.
Arizona State’s old on-campus park - where Arkansas played the super regional in 2010 and regional in 2011 - only averaged 2,800 in its final year. That was good enough for 20th nationally, which shows how steep attendance falls once you get past the SEC schools, Texas and TCU. I was kind of shocked at how many empty seats were there for those Arkansas games, given Arizona State’s history, what was on the line, etc., but that’s what you get in a pro market.
It is true that there are a lot of small college baseball stadiums. However, if you just go with the flow it can be enjoyable to travel to some of those sites. I remember when we went to the Kansas State regional. It was a very small ball park but we enjoyed Manhattan. There was a super regional at Baylor where we stole a trip to Omaha. It was not huge but the atmosphere was great and the people were the classiest.