Sunday, May 24, 2009

Final Regional Projections

By Samuel Chi

The NCAA will announce this year's regional sites at 3:30 p.m. ET (12:30 p.m. PT). If you want to get a jump on things, it'll be shown on ESPN's Bottom Line crawl and also at www.ncaa.com.

The following teams are projected to get to host regionals -

ACC (4) - Florida State, North Carolina, Clemson, Georgia Tech
SEC (3) - LSU, Florida, Mississippi
Big West (2)- UC Irvine, Cal State Fullerton
Big 12 (2) - Texas, Oklahoma
Pac-10 - Arizona State
MWC - Texas Christian
CUSA - Rice
Big East - Louisville
Big Ten - Minnesota

Since the sites will be announced before the games are over on Sunday, the national and regional seedings may change slightly. At the moment, this looks like how the top teams will be seeded:

1. Texas, 2. Arizona State, 3. UC Irvine, 4. LSU, 5. Cal State Fullerton, 6. Florida State, 7. Rice, 8. North Carolina.

Rice may have to win the Conference USA title game to secure the national seed, or it may fall to Florida.

The other regional hosts are expected to be 1-seeds, except Minnesota, which may end up as a 2-seed if Virgina wins the ACC championship game against Florida State.

The Titans are locked into the No. 1 spot in the RPI, no matter what happens in today's games. Fullerton is certain to get a national seed, and because of a dearth of quality West Coast teams this year, it may get a pretty favorable draw both in the regional and the super regional.

The entire 64-team bracket will be announced on ESPN at 12:30 p.m. ET (9:30 a.m. PT) on Monday.

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