Baseball vs. Longwood - StateFans Nation StateFans Nation

Wolfpack Baseball goes out of conference this weekend to take on the Lancers of Longwood University.

Located in Farmville, VA, the Lancers compete in the Big South Conference. Currently they hold an overall record of 19-23, 7-11 in the Big South (9th), and have an RPI of 161.

And without any extensive research, because I honestly just haven’t had time this week, that’s all I know about them.

So instead, let’s talk about something else (But if you want some more info, you can probably find it here or maybe here).

–

First, by virtue of the Pack’s series win over UVa last weekend, their own RPI now sits at #55, ten spots higher than this time last week.

The Pack also managed to fight back (after the Friday loss to UVa) and reclaim its hold on the #7 seed for the upcoming ACC Baseball Tournament. Since the Pack plays OOC this weekend they can’t directly have any impact on that, but hopefully some other results will help (Louisville pounding Clemson, for example, would be a good thing).

In any case, going forward I hope to see that the UVa series has helped the Pack9 find their marbles.

–

And I guess we might as well go ahead and get the ACC Baseball Tourney format stuff out of the way (since I already wrote it a week ago, and thus it requires minimal effort on my part today).

Refresher Course: ACC Baseball Tourney Format

Several years ago, the ACC opted to change its Baseball Championship Tournament from the double elimination format with which many are familiar, to the pool format. I’ll leave discussion of the reasons for the change (schedule, pitching, etc), as well as some of its shortcomings (tiebreakers) to the comments section and just stick with the basics of format here.

Of the 14 ACC teams that play baseball (C’mon ‘Cuse…get with the program), only the top 10 teams qualify for the the ACC Baseball Tournament. The seedings of those teams, and how they’re grouped into two different pools, basically follows the same rules as a bracketed tournament would (ie. 1vs8, 4vs5, and so on).

That is to say that Pool A will contain the 1,4,5 and 8/9 seeds, while Pool B will contain the 2,3,6 and 7/10 seeds.

Basically, if you look at a 10 team single elimination bracketed tournament, you would group the pools by taking the halves of the bracket and grouping those seeds together in the same pool, and getting rid of the bracket.

The tournament begins on Tuesday with the single elimination play-in games pitting #7 vs #10 and #8 vs #9. The winners of those two games then move into their respective pool, based on seedings.

From there, the four teams in each pool will play each of the teams in their respective pool once in a round robin format. Those games run Wednesday thru Saturday, with each team getting a day off somewhere in the mix.

The two teams with the best record in each pool then play the championship game on Sunday.

If a team goes 3-0 in their pool, they advance. If there are two teams tied at 2-1, the head to head winner advances. If there are three teams tied at 2-1, the higher seed advances. So even with the pool format, seeding potentially matters.

This year’s ACC Baseball Tournament will be held in Durham at the DBAP, May 19-24. Ticket packages are available here.

Current ACCT Seedings