Tennessee projected as regional host ahead of Sunday announcement

Despite being run-ruled by Vanderbilt in the Southeastern Conference Tournament semifinal on Saturday afternoon in Hoover, Tennessee baseball remains as a projected regional host ahead of Sunday’s announcement on social media.

To be clear, the official selection show with the complete bracket breakdown of region by region will be unveiled Monday at 12 PM ET. The regional host sites will be announced, with no specific seedings, on Sunday night at 8:30 on X (@NCAABaseball).

Tennessee entered Sunday projected as the No. 14 overall seed from D1 Baseball. The Knoxville Regional in this simulation would be the Vols (1), West Virginia (2), Western Kentucky (3) and Miami of Ohio (4). The Knoxville Regional would matchup with the Fayetteville Regional for supers in this exercise.   

11Point7 couldn’t settle on one unified Field of 64 update on Sunday morning, but of the three site members who comprise the updates, all three had Tennessee as a host site in their respected field.

The Vols were as high as a No. 11 seed by one member with West Virginia, ETSU and Miami (OH) in the region. The two other members projected the Vols as the No. 13 overall seed with a combination of NC State, West Virginia, ETSU, Cincinnati and Murray State as regional foes.

On3’s Jonathan Wagner projected Tennessee as the No. 15 overall seed on Sunday morning with Georgia Tech (2), USC (3) and Fairfield (4). The super regional matchup in this simulation would be with the the Austin Regional and host Texas, who is the No. 2 overall seed.

Baseball America projects Tennessee as the No. 13 overall seed with Kansas (2), ETSU (3) and Binghamton (4).

Entering the conference tournament, Tennessee was on the outside looking in in terms of hosting an NCAA regional.

The Vols had dropped five-straight series to end the regular season and six of the past seven. Still, 16 wins over conference teams is always impressive and the Vols boasted 12 wins over Quad 1 teams in the hunt.

A couple of wins, though, at the conference tournament changed that tune and Tennessee was sitting pretty following a 15-10 triumph of Alabama and a 7-5 victory in 12 innings over top-seeded Texas. The Vols now have 18 wins over SEC foes.  

“It would be great for our kids,” Tony Vitello said Saturday on the potential to host a regional. “We’re not in control of it, so we’ll let those people that are fully qualified sit in the room and diagnose that, but I think the fact we came here and got two wins and racked up RPI — I’d assume Texas and Vanderbilt are 1 and 2 or 3 or 4 in RPI and Alabama was a swing host team. We were able to beat them.” 

At the time of this writing, Tennessee owns a real RPI ranking of No.13. Ole Miss, TCU, Georgia Tech, Southern Miss, Dallas Baptist, UCLA and Alabama are also battling for the final few host slots.    

Tennessee owns the head-to-head matchups over Ole Miss and Alabama with series-wins in the regular season. Florida, who also entered the week in the hosting conversation, also dropped a series to Tennessee in the regular season.

“I think it would be phenomenal for the fans to have another go-around,” Vitello concluded. “It was kind of a quirky year where timing of some things and weather of things just wasn’t ideal, and then there were some times where we had an opportunity to entertain the fans, which is certainly not the goal, and it did not occur.

“These kids have played well on the road, but we’d like to play at Lindsey Nelson Stadium.”