Two baseball thoughts....

[Philly Dawg]

1) Wins at this stage of the season have little effect on RPI. Arkansas beat Ole Miss (#18) and LSU (#5) and are still at #45.

2) Saturday's games start the single elimination phase. So that should help our pitching situation with us having a day of rest.

 

[engie]

1) Wins at this stage of the season have little effect on RPI. Arkansas beat Ole Miss (#1 and LSU (#5) and are still at #45.

2) Saturday's games start the single elimination phase. So that should help our pitching situation with us having a day of rest.

Arkansas is RPI #34 now. So, yes, these wins are helping their RPI in a very big way -- which is a good thing for us at this point. We're a lock to host and the #9 overall host at this point according to Baseball America -- meaning by their projections we only need Indiana to falter or to beat Vandy and LSU in single games to slip into their national seed projections.

 

[Philly Dawg]

Boyd's World has them at 45 as of 6:30 AM today, but maybe that does not include yesterday's games.

 

[engie]

Boyd's World has them at 45 as of 6:30 AM today, but maybe that does not include yesterday's games.

Boyds doesn't update till 8 or 9 am -- once daily, I believe. So, that probably is prior to the LSU win being counted...

If Arky beats them again, they will be in the hosting conversation again IMO -- as they will have an RPI inside the top 30.

ETA: I've noticed some glitches and difficulty with different scoring metrics like RPI and the such with d1baseball.com being down this week. Seems several of these sites used them as their primary resource for updating info. At this point, Boyd's RPI still hasn't updated but Warren Nolan has...

 

[615dawg]

If Arkansas hosts, it will probably be at South Carolina's expense.

As far as State getting a Super - lots of interesting things happening across the nation.

Florida State is 0-2 in the ACC Tourney. They play Virginia Saturday. A loss to Virginia, combined with us beating Vandy on Saturday, and we could pass them in RPI.

Right behind them is North Carolina State. They play Miami today and UNC Saturday. Although NC State is likely to stay ahead of us in RPI, I am inclined to throw them out of the competition. I think they are competing solely with Florida State. No conference has ever had four national seeds, and I don't see that changing.

So who is in contention for the final national seed?

The frontrunner has to be Oregon. They have a road series at Utah this weekend. If they win that series, that may be enough. Their RPI is 7, and they are in striking distance of having a top 5 RPI. If they lose the series at 20-29 Utah, that spot is up for grabs.

Louisville's 0-2 probably knocked them out, but Indiana could grab that last spot. They have Ohio State today. We need the Buckeyes to win in the worst way.

We're next. We need to win the SEC Tournament, preferably with wins over Vandy and LSU, and have Indiana and Oregon stumble.

 

[Maroon Eagle]

One thing to bear in mind with Arkansas' RPI now being #34... The 48th place RPI team Oklahoma (which is where Arkansas was last week) has a number of 0.5474. Arkansas's current number is .5547.

By contrast, MSU is #10 with an RPI of .6013. 9th place is NC State at .6103. 11th place is Virginia Tech at .5950.

 

[drt7891]

Exactly. The further up the RPI rankings you move, the tougher it is to jump spots. I think the UK series is the biggest obstacle on ours, but still, pretty impressive. Wins over LSU and Vandy would only help.

Also, I don't think I'll even go out on a limb on this one... but I'd be shocked if Vandy even made it to the national title game. Just a prediction.

 

[MetEdDawg]

We've been closing that gap behind NC State pretty well the last week and a half

Before the SC series I think we were about .0250 RPI points behind NC State, but our 2 out of 3 against SC and our 3 tournament wins have closed the gap considerably. Warren Nolan only has us .0090 RPI points behind NC State for 9th place and only .0105 behind FSU. Another loss for them and an 0-3 showing in pool play might be enough to knock them out of the national seed conversation. Losses by NC State and FSU, combined with a win by us on Saturday might do it. Gonna be an interesting last few days of tournament play.