Notre Dame baseball climbs into NCAA Tournament field projections

There is still a month of baseball to play in the regular season, but Notre Dame might be doing enough to extend its season beyond that. The Fighting Irish appeared in both D1Baseball.com and Baseball America’s NCAA Tournament field of 64 projections on Wednesday.

Notre Dame (23-16, 11-10 ACC) is predicted to be a No. 3 regional seed in both outlets’ forecasts. There are 16 regionals in the tournament, and each one of those has teams seeded No. 1 through No. 4. No. 4 seeds are generally reserved for automatic qualifiers of teams that won their conference tournaments in smaller conferences.

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D1Baseball has Notre Dame as the No. 3 seed in the Bloomington Regional hosted by No. 1 seed Indiana. The other teams in the regional would be No. 2 Tennessee and No. 4 Wright State. Baseball America has Notre Dame as the No. 3 seed in the Terre Haute Regional hosted by No. 1 seed Indiana State. The other teams in the regional would be No. 2 Arizona State and No. 4 Central Michigan.

Before Irish fans get excited by the prospects of Notre Dame staying within state borders for the postseason and also getting the chance to match up against last year’s Super Regional foe in the Volunteers, keep in mind it’s very early for specific matchups to hold true. The bigger takeaway here is that the Irish are actually being picked to qualify for the big dance. That hasn’t been the case for most of the season.

Notre Dame is coming off a sweep of then-No. 8 Virginia. The Cavaliers are projected to host a regional per D1Baseball and Baseball America. The Irish have to hold serve at home this weekend against former Notre Dame head coach Link Jarrett and his reeling Florida State Seminoles.

The remaining ACC schedule does not get very easy from there. The Irish host NC State, a projected No. 3 regional seed per both outlets, from May 4-6 and are on the road at Boston College, a No. 1 regional seed per both outlets, from May 18-20.

The goal for head coach Shawn Stiffler’s team is pretty straight-forward. A winning record of 5-4 in the last nine ACC games would keep the Irish firmly on the bubble. A 6-3 record would probably be enough to punch their at-large ticket. A losing record of any kind complicates matters and makes the ACC Tournament a potential do-or-die situation.

Spring baseball has arrived for the Irish. Can they do enough to play summer baseball?