Are you kidding us? What a wild ride this NCAA II season has been. We know we have been saying this all season long…but dang! This last weekend, as the conference tournaments concluded, completely took our breath away. And as the NCAA tournament kicks off this week, we expect even more surprises and more fantastic baseball to come.
We will be covering the 8 regions, and the results of the tournaments over the next few days. So, we won’t do that here as we release the final rankings of the season until after the College World Series winner is crowned. But a few notes we would like to point out.
First, Saint Joseph’s Pumas doors have closed, the school is no more. But no one has told the baseball team that yet. These guys are keeping the lights on and giving the entire Puma community one last “hoorah.”
Do you know how many of our Top 20 teams won their conference tournaments? Five. (Note: Tampa and Azusa Pacific won their regular season titles, and did not have a conference tournament to participate in).
All season long, we have watched teams go on 10, 11, 12 game win steaks and looking like world beaters. Only to end up in the Top 10…and then the bottom fall out as some upstart team knocks it off and takes its place. We have never seen such a volatile season, which is why we have dubbed 2017 as “the-best-season-ever.”
This has been fun to watch folks. Top to bottom, D2 baseball played at a level we have never seen. There are teams packing their stuff and heading home right now that in past years, would be on a bus tomorrow headed to the NCAA tournament site. There are others that are grumbling right now that they should have been included in this year’s teams that were selected by the NCAA (we will have a series coming up digging into the NCAA method of choosing NCAA Tournament teams, why they do it the way they do, and possible recommendations for improvement. Please watch our site after the CWS to check out that series).
The season is over. Conference championships won. Now, its win or do inventory. Who is going to be the 8 teams in Grand Prairie in two weeks? Who is going to come out on top as the National Champion? Anyone that says they know for sure is probably lying to you. This thing is wide open!
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