Quote:For years, college baseball coaches and fans alike have asked the same question about how the NCAA tournament field is assembled.

“If softball can seed the top teams in the tournament 1-16, why can’t baseball?”. That’s the question that has been on everyone’s mind for at least the past decade. It was guaranteed to come up at every State of Baseball press conference in Omaha, and it has always been a topic of discussion at the American Baseball Coaches Association Convention as well.

That question no longer needs to be asked, as the NCAA baseball postseason format will include seeding the Top 16 teams as opposed to the Top 8 teams that we are accustomed to, a measure that was approved this past week by the Division I Baseball Committee and subsequently approved by the NCAA Championship Oversight Committee.

The best news? It’ll start in 2018 and the format will call for 1 vs. 16, 2 vs. 15, and so on in the super regional round. Should one of those seeds get upset in the regional round, the winner of the regional would replace them as that seed and there would not be a reseeding process, a potential future change that many coaches are still in favor of.

“This is a great step forward for our sport and long overdue,” TCU coach Jim Schlossnagle said. “College baseball has grown to the point that regionalization of the NCAA tournament should be an afterthought to putting the best possible tournament structure together.”

For the most part, the feeling from the NCAA had always been that it wants to help grow and promote the sport in different parts of the country, while also hoping to present supers that will be buzzy for television ratings and attractive matchups. Therefore, we have consistently ended up with outstanding super regionals such as Florida-Florida State, Florida-Miami, of course TCU-Texas A&M, and out on the West Coast, it was a virtual guarantee that some of those teams would be paired in the supers round. While exciting, it left a salty taste in the mouthes of several coaches over the years.

But the idea of shifting away from ranking the traditional 1-8 national seeds and moving to a 1-16 seeding format began to gain more traction this past summer in Omaha, thanks to NCAA Division I Committee chairman Scott Sidwell, the athletic director at the University of San Francisco, and others.

Sidwell never budged when asked about the possibility of seeding 1-16. He would always say “absolutely”, and by the end of his trip to Omaha, he made it clear it was his mission to make sure that change occurred before his tenure was up.

He and other members of the committee didn’t waste any time and college baseball will now see a much-needed change take place.