I can see that, I also have a Tennessee vibe for some reason.
Until the NCAA does away with the 400-mile rule and starts seeding the Top 32, it is unlikely we get sent anywhere east of the Mississippi. Just too many teams within 400 miles of those host sites, and too few teams within 400 miles of places like Washington,
Oregon, and Stanford.
It is possible if there are enough hosts in that general part of the country that they can’t bus teams to all of the sites.
All we have to do is look at recent history:
2013 - Washington
2014 - Host
2015 - Arizona
2016 - Washington
2017 - Alabama
2018 - Washington
2019 - Host
2021 - UCLA
2022 - Oklahoma
The only time we were sent east of the Mississippi was 2017, which is such an anomaly because we were RPI 11 and ranked #1 in the coaches poll and #2 or #3 in the media poll.
It was so controversial that ESPN’s selection show led with the “surprise” of that decision. Once the NCAA decided that Ole Miss should host instead of us because they (RPI 21) won the SEC tournament, they knew they had to be able to say they moved us to #17 to face #16 because as preposterous as that matchup was, it would have been worse if they had sent us to say, an 8-seed, which would appear to make us barely a Top 25 team in their eyes.
They didn’t want to seed Ole Miss at 16 because they knew we’d obliterate them, so they put Alabama at 16, which sent us to a team with two legitimate ace pitchers who our hitters had never seen before, and to one of the toughest road venues in the country (until a year or two ago, Alabama had never lost a single regional GAME at Tuscaloosa, much less a regional).
That discussion about how we ended up in Alabama’s regional in 2017 was long-winded, but I find at this time of year I need to remind myself of the capriciousness of the NCAA and revisit the horror of that selection day to exorcise those demons and manage expectations for the coming selection day.
To the NCAA’s credit, payback occurred two years later, when I was getting Tweets from Gopher softball basically begging the NCAA for a regional hosting slot when we had an RPI of 7 going into the selection. I tweeted back that we were aiming too low — we not only deserved to host a regional but we deserved to host a super-regional as well. Fortunately, the joy of that selection show partially erased the disappointment of two years prior.
