The NCAA Baseball Tournament explained

So for the second time in three years, the Mountaineers will be heading to the NCAA Baseball Tournament.

It’s a great thing to see for a program that has come such a long way since the dreadful Greg Van Zant era.

Since this is something us as a fanbase isn’t usually accustomed to, we figured it would be a good idea to walk anyone who may not be familiar with the NCAA Regionals, Super Regionals and College World Series how the whole thing works. It can be very complicated, so we’ll go through it step-by-step using the most recent time WVU went as an example.

Step 1: NCAA Regionals

After the field of 64 is selected, teams are put in place within each regional.

The Morgantown Regional (wow, I still can’t believe those are two words that I’m putting together) will be exactly like the section of bracket that the Mountaineers just came out of in the Big 12 Tournament. It’s a four team double-elimination bracket. For reference, here is what the Winston-Salem Regional looked like two years ago when West Virginia was in it.

Step 2: The Super Regionals

The winner of the Morgantown Regional (hopefully it’s WVU) will advance to the Super Regionals and take on the winner of the Nashville Regional.

If Vanderbilt wins the regional in Nashville, the super regional will be there. If anyone else wins the Nashville Regional and WVU also wins, the super regional will be in Morgantown.

Super Regionals are just a best-of-three series with the winner advancing to Omaha. Here’s what happened to Wake Forest two years ago (along with how the regionals were compared):

Step 3: College World Series

Once you get to Omaha, it’s almost exactly the same as the Big 12 Tournament. It’s an eight-team double elimination bracket.

The lone difference is that once only two teams remain, it turns into a three-game series for the national championship.

Continuing with 2017, here’s how it worked:

We’ll give you the schedule as it is released.