Basketball bracketologists (and the NCAA committee) have used an RPI nitty gritty report to help them make selection and seeding decisions. The same is available for baseball and Warren Nolan’s site offers a nitty gritty page. So I thought I’d take a look at that to try to make some sense of the race for national seeding and regional hosts.
One real advantage the Hogs have is their record against top-50 RPI teams. Part of that is being a division leader in the toughest league in the country. But our West competition, AKA the Rebnecks, are not nearly as good. We’re 18-8 against top 50; beating TAM today would make it 19-8. Ole Miss is only 14-10. As far as top-8 contenders, only Florida has more than 18 top-50 wins.
As noted in another thread, while we have a losing road record, it’s not that horrible compared to other top-8 contenders. T-Tech is 11-10, OM is 10-8. North Carolina is 11-9. Georgia is 11-11 and may be sub-.500 if the Gators finish the sweep today.
(Completely unrelated side note: Apparently this year the NLR game is being counted by the NCAA as a home game; in some previous years it was seen as a neutral game. But that decision also makes it possible for the Hogs to finish with 30 home wins. Winning today would make us 30-3 at home. I’m pretty sure 29 home wins is already a school record.)
Brackets come out in 15 days and a lot can happen before then. But here are my host schools if the field came out tomorrow:
Top 8 seeds, in no particular order – Florida, Stanford, Oregon State, Arkansas, Ole Miss, North Carolina, Florida State, Texas Tech.
Regional hosts (9-16) – Stetson, Georgia, Auburn, Clemson, UConn, Minnesota, Duke, Kentucky
As noted in another thread, while we have a losing road record, it’s not that horrible compared to other top-8 contenders. T-Tech is 11-10, OM is 10-8. North Carolina is 11-9. Georgia is 11-11 and may be sub-.500 if the Gators finish the sweep today.
[/quote]Well, the Hogs have the worst road record of the top 50 RPI teams…only five wins…much below the SEC competition noted above.
A win today over the Aggies and a couple next week may give the hogs some breathing room! Oh course Hoover just the hogs a chance to gain ground as well.
I sure hope they get a top 8 seed
That road record better improve bigtime against a very good Georgia team or we don’t win the West. OlePiss plays Bama. Getting help from Bama winding down their season with no SEC tourney in their future is a long shot at best.
Bama should have won the first two games against LSU and did win the second one. The Tide isn’t very good but they haven’t folded their tents yet.
Getting back to my OP side note, the 1989 Hogs that went 51-16 and got to Omaha were 29-4 at George Cole Field (they were 25-1 then lost three of the last seven). The next year, when we went 47-15 and lost in the Wichita regional, we went 34-5 at GCF. Looks like three home losses is the fewest ever but 30 wins won’t be a record. That '89 team had an oddity: We beat Wichita in the opener in February, and lost to Wichita almost four months later to get eliminated in Omaha. Weird sandwich for the season.
The caveat to that is WHO we’ll have played away from home. No one else has played Florida, Ole Miss, LSU and Georgia on the road. And with the exception of the Saturday game in Gainesville, all have been close games that we could . . . in some cases, should . . . have won. So, it’s not like we’ve laid down on the road, in general (the one exception is MSU, a team we are definitely better than). We’ve faced a gauntlet that no one else has had to face.