NCAA Division I Baseball Championship
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The NCAA Division I Baseball Championship tournament is held each year in June and features 64 college baseball teams in the United States, culminating in the College World Series.
The tournament is unique in that it features four tiers of competition, each contested on a double-elimination basis. In fact, throughout the entire tournament, a team can lose a total of four games and still be crowned champions.
During team selection, eight teams are given national seeds which guarantees them home-field advantage (provided they continue to win) throughout the tournament until the College World Series. As in other NCAA tournaments, conference champions (usually determined by a tournament) receive automatic bids, and the selection committee fills the remaining spots.
The first tier, called Regionals, consists of 16 locations that include four teams, seeded 1 through 4, competing in a double-elimination bracket. The 16 host sites are determined mostly by merit - most No. 1 seeds host - but are also contested by bids from schools guaranteeing the NCAA a certain amount of revenue from that regional. Host teams traditionally have a large advantage, although the home team for each game is determined by rule, so the host school sometimes plays as the visiting team. The winner of each regional moves on to the second tier, the Super Regionals.
Super Regionals are played at eight locations throughout the country and consist of the 16 surviving teams, matched up by predetermined regional pairings. National seeds cannot meet each other in the super regional and are guaranteed to host. If the national seed in the bracket is eliminated in the regional stage, the super regional will be bid upon by the two competing teams. The two teams play a best-of-three series to determine who moves on to the College World Series. Although one school hosts all three games, the teams split home-field advantage in the first two games and toss a coin to determine home-field advantage in the third game.
The final eight teams meet up in Omaha, Nebraska in the College World Series. The CWS mimics the earlier rounds, consisting of two double-elimination brackets of four teams each and a championship series between the two winners. The winner of the College World Series is crowned National Champion.
[edit] Past Formats
Until 1999, the NCAA tournament featured 48 teams, which contested in eight regionals of six teams each for the right to go to the College World Series. The four-team regional format and the best-of-three super regional format debuted in 1999. The best-of-three championship series at the College World Series debuted in 2003 after CBS ceased coverage of the one-off College World Series championship game, allowing the NCAA to institute the best-of-three series, which better mimics the traditional three-game series played during the regular season and makes a pitching staff's depth a key factor. ESPN and ESPN2 now cover the entire CWS.
