Kentucky Baseball Bubble Watch: Bid Stealers Could Kill Postseason Dreams

It’s Selection Monday for the NCAA Baseball Tournament. For a good chunk of the season, Kentucky was on the right side of the bubble. That bubble may have burst at the eleventh hour.

Ahead of the final Kentucky baseball series of the regular season, there was a common hope across Big Blue Nation: “Just get one more win.” They had four opportunities and capitalized on none of them.

The Bat Cats were a strike away from a win over Vanderbilt. It was one of two walk-off losses in Nashville. Kentucky had another shot to secure a victory in the SEC Tournament against a team they swept two weeks prior. They failed to get a resume-boosting win over Oklahoma in Hoover.

The late-season slide put Kentucky’s NCAA Tournament fate in the hands of others who would gladly take it away. On Sunday, we got a bad case of the bid-stealers.

Nebraska secured an automatic bid by upsetting No. 15 UCLA 5-0 in the Big Ten Tournament Title. The Hilltoppers of Western Kentucky had a walk-off win in the C-USA Title. East Carolina upset Tulane 8-2 to win the AAC Tournament Championship.

Anything that could go wrong, went wrong. Kentucky needed No. 22 UC-Irvine to win the Big West Title on Sunday evening to avoid another bid-steal scenario. Guess what happened: Cal Poly beat UC-Irvine on the second straight day to secure its spot in the NCAA Tournament.

Following Sunday’s results, all of the major college baseball publications have Kentucky on the outside of the NCAA Tournament field. D1 Baseball and Baseball America both project the Cats as the first team out.

Kentucky had a lead in 28 of 31 SEC games. They only won 13 of those games. It felt like the Bat Cats finally turned a corner in the series win at Tennessee, but the late-season skid may have been too costly to get back into the NCAA Tournament a year after reaching the College World Series.

NCAA Tournament Regional Hosts

On Sunday night, the NCAA revealed the 16 national seeds and eight of them are from the SEC. We will receive the full field and learn the Kentucky baseball team’s fate at Noon ET on ESPN2.

Athens Regional (Georgia)
Auburn Regional (Auburn)
Austin Regional (Texas)
Baton Rouge Regional (LSU)
Chapel Hill Regional (North Carolina)
Clemson Regional (Clemson)
Conway Regional (Coastal Carolina)
Corvallis Regional (Oregon State)
Eugene Regional (Oregon)
Fayetteville Regional (Arkansas)
Hattiesburg Regional (Southern Miss)
Knoxville Regional (Tennessee)
Los Angeles Regional (UCLA)
Nashville Regional (Vanderbilt)
Oxford Regional (Ole Miss)
Tallahassee Regional (Florida State)

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