From time to time during the college baseball season, the few people who cover D1 baseball attempt to project the NCAA tournament field, often attempting to place projected tournament teams into specific regions.
This morning, after all the NCAA D1 conference championships had all been settled yesterday, D1Baseball.com posted their final projection of the tournament field.
Six or 7 of the national seeds and 13 or 14 of the regional hosts were self-evident, so the value of the projection was presumably in placing the two, three, and four seeds in the various regions.
How'd they do?
They placed 10 out of 48 teams in the correct region.
In 9 regions they whiffed completely. In 2 regions, they got only the #4 seed right.
They got the #2 seed right 3 out of 16 times:
--They correctly predicted that Dallas Baptist would have to go several hours west to Lubbock instead of playing TCU locally.
--They correctly predicted that Big 10 champ Ohio State would head south, cross the Ohio River and play in the nearest regional site, Louisville.
--They correctly predicted that NEC champ Bryant (a team that proved you can get an impressive RPI despite playing 34 games against teams with RPI's worse than 200 as long as enough of them are road games) would also come south to the closest regional site, Charlottesville.
That's about it. The sum total of the value of putting their heads together to make that projection.
I realize that it's an exciting time of year and everyone wants to think they have insight into what is going to happen. But it's hard to imagine a less productive use of time---unless it's the time I wasted analyzing it.
Best wishes in the tourney to the HSBaseballWeb friends and family who have players in it.
