Florida State coach Mike Martin hammers committee over NC State snub

The college baseball community was shocked to find that NC State baseball didn’t make the NCAA Tournament’s 64-team bracket, despite their late season surge. The Wolfpack was omitted from the tournament in favor of the Ole Miss Rebels

NCAA Tournament Selection Committee Chair Mike Buddie suggest that a couple of reasons for this can be pointed toward non-conference strength of schedule. According to D1Baseball’s RPI rankings, NC State’s non-conference strength of schedule was ranked No. 189 in the nation while Ole Miss was No. 38 overall, though several factors in other categories strongly swayed in favor of NC State.

With many of baseball’s most prominent voices weighing in on the matter, Florida State head coach Mike Martin gave his take on the situation.

“It’s what happens when you don’t have representation from your league on the committee. The ones that do have representation seem to get taken care of,” Martin said. “I feel so bad for [NC State head coach] Elliott [Avent] and his tremendous ball club that he has. There’s no way they shouldn’t be in.”

While there might not be any ACC representation in college baseball’s NCAA Tournament Selection Committee, there were still nine ACC teams to make the 64-team field – including Florida State. Though, they have one of the hardest Regional matchups in the entire tournament.

Martin’s Seminoles will enter the four-team, double-elimination Auburn Regional as the three seed and will battle two-seeded UCLA with the winner facing either one-seed and No. 14 overall seed Auburn, or four-seed Southeastern Louisiana.

If the Tigers win as expected and FSU prevails over the Bruins, Florida State will have to defeat Auburn twice to advance to a Super Regional, while Auburn only has to win once as the Region host. Each respective Regional tournament is set to begin Friday, June 3, playing through Monday, June 6 before Super Regional play begins on Friday, June 10 through Sunday, June 12 – or Saturday, June 11 through Monday, June 13.

While NC State will be watching nine of their conference foes vie for the 2022 College World Series crown from the couch during that time, they can rest assured that some of baseball’s biggest names have their backs after the announcement that dumbfounded the baseball community.