Quote:
Originally Posted by Tigercat
Objective measure? How about "Did this team finish at least in the top 80% of wins in their conference?"
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I'm not sure what that proves either though, given the disparity in conference strengths.
Let's face it, the 18 one-bid conferences (who could often fit that criteria) didn't exactly set the tournament on fire. 14-34 to be exact, and 3 of those wins came from Louisville. And the 4 two-bid conferences weren't a lot better, just 5-16 with only one win that didn't come from the Sun Belt. Did the B12 lay an egg? Absolutely. But I'm not sure I see any reason to think replacing half their teams with four other candidates would have produced a different result ... (edit to add) unless maybe you just hand out bids to teams in the Pacific time zone regardless of their records (as western teams were really the primary source of 3 bid or less representatives that did much). But there's already concern about the western & southern bias in college baseball, politically I'm not sure the committee felt like they wanted to go down that road too far. Now that bias doesn't bother me, it's just the reverse of NCAA hockey afaic, but it's a reality I'm sure they have to address.
Truth is, there probably aren't 64 baseball teams that are competitive at the highest level, and a 32 team tournament would be sufficient at this point.