College Baseball BCS (May 22)

By Samuel Chi

One more week before the regional pairings announcement, the top of the standings look pretty solidified with all but one of the national seeds spoken for. The top six teams in the current standings should be locks for national seeds, as well as No. 9 UCLA, leaving the final spot up for grabs among No. 7 Rice, No. 8 North Carolina and No. 9 Texas A&M.

Florida State, ranked No. 1 in four of the five polls, appears to be the odds-on favorite to be the top-seeded team in the upcoming 64-team field. This is the fifth straight week the Seminoles are on top of the BCS standings. Florida, Baylor, Oregon, LSU and South Carolina, the other national seed locks, round out Nos. 2-6.

The Titans, who lost their first weekend series since the season-opener at Florida, dropped three spots to No. 15, teetering on the edge of a regional host bid. Kentucky likewise had a precipitous fall, plummeting seven spots to No. 13.

There is a remarkable consensus among the five polls as to the top 26 teams. Only Collegiate Baseball's stubborn ranking of Texas and Oklahoma fell outside of this consensus. Each of the top 25 teams in the standings are ranked by at least four polls and No. 26 Mississippi State is on three ballots.

The conference breakdown: SEC (7), Pac-12 (6), ACC (6), Big 12 (4), Conference USA (3), West Coast (3), Big East (1), Big Ten (1), Big West (1), Mountain West (1), Independent (1).

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College Baseball BCS (May 15)

By Samuel Chi

The polls are a bit divergent this week, with three different teams crowned No. 1 in five polls. But Florida State, on the strength of three No. 1s and solid RPI and ISR scores, retained the top spot in the College Baseball BCS standings for a fourth consecutive week.

The Seminoles are followed by Sunshine State rival Florida, South Carolina, Baylor and Oregon in the top five. The Gamecocks and Ducks each received a No. 1 ranking this week. The Bears, losing their first three Big 12 games this season when they were swept by Oklahoma, fell out of the top five in three polls.

The Titans, who won their 11th consecutive weekend series, fell one spot to No. 12. Fullerton is two spots behind its likely Super Regional foe UCLA and one ahead of Stanford and three ahead of Arizona, two of the teams likely to be sent to the Fullerton Regional as a No. 2 seed.

TCU returns to the top 25, checking in at No. 24, displacing Louisville, last week's No. 24. Gonzaga and St. John's are out of the rankings while Appalachian State and Oklahoma check in.

The conference breakdown: SEC (7), Pac-12 (6), ACC (6), Big 12 (5), Conference USA (3), Big East (1), Big Ten (1), Big West (1), Mountain West (1), Southern (1), West Coast (1), Independent (1).

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College Baseball BCS (May 8)

By Samuel Chi

There isn't a lot of shakeups near the top of this week's Baseball BCS standings, as Florida State holds the No. 1 spot for the third straight week. The Seminoles are a unanimous No. 1 choice of all five polls and rank No. 1 in the ISR and No. 2 in the RPI.

Baylor is second, followed by a trio of SEC teams - Florida, South Carolina and LSU - followed by another Lone Star entry in Rice. Oregon, at No. 7, is the highest ranked West Coast team.

The Titans just missed being in the top 10, thanks to the continued low rankings in the USA Today coaches poll and NCBWA poll. UCLA checks in at No. 9 and Stanford at No. 13.

No new teams made it into the top 25, but several first-time entries are lurking. TCU is back in the picture at No. 26 and Dallas Baptist makes its BCS debut at No. 27.

The conference breakdown: SEC (7), Pac-12 (6), ACC (6), Big 12 (4), Conference USA (3), WCC (2), Big East (2), Big Ten (1), Big West (1), Mountain West (1), Independent (1).

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College Baseball BCS (May 1)

By Samuel Chi

This week's College Baseball BCS standings. Three teams are added to the standings while last week's two bottom dwellers - Wake Forest and Oklahoma - dropped out.

For the second consecutive week, Florida State is No. 1 in the standings, followed by Baylor, which earned the lone No. 1 poll ranking (in Collegiate Baseball) that didn't go to the Seminoles. The Bears are followed by four SEC teams: South Carolina, LSU, Florida and Kentucky.

Stanford is now the highest-ranked Pac-12 team, at No. 7, as UCLA dropped out of the top 10 after losing a weekend series to the Cardinal, to No. 13. Cal State Fullerton, idle last weekend, plummeted four spots to No. 15.

The conference breakdown: SEC (6), Pac-12 (6), ACC (5), Big 12 (4), Conference USA (3), WCC (2), Big Ten (1), Big East (1), Big West (1), Big South (1), Southland (1), Southern (1), WAC (1).

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College Baseball BCS (April 24)

By Samuel Chi

This week's College Baseball BCS standings. Two teams made it into the standings in addition to last week's 30.

Florida State replaced Florida atop the new standings. The Gators slid to No. 2, followed by Kentucky, red-hot Baylor and LSU. Rice made the biggest jump this week, going from No. 12 to No. 7, while Texas A&M had the most precipitous drop, going down 10 spots to No. 15. The Titans moved up four spots to No. 11.

The conference breakdown: SEC (6), Pac-12 (6), ACC (6), Big 12 (4), Conference USA (3), WCC (2), Big Ten (1), Big East (1), Big West (1), Southland (1), WAC (1).

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College Baseball BCS (April 17)

By Samuel Chi

This week's College Baseball BCS standings. The top 30 teams stayed completely intact, though we've had quite a shuffle at the top of the standings.

Florida returned to the top of the standings after defeating last week's No. 1 Florida State in a midweek game. The team that made the biggest jump is UCLA, moving up from No. 12 to No. 6. Miami took the biggest plunge, dropping from No. 7 to No. 16.

The conference breakdown: SEC (6), Pac-12 (6), ACC (5), Big 12 (3), Conference USA (3), WCC (2), Big Ten (1), Big East (1), Big West (1), Southland (1), WAC (1).

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College Baseball BCS (April 10)

By Samuel Chi

This week's Baseball BCS standings provide a bit more clarity and settle some things as the polls diverged wildly after a slew of top 10 teams were upset last week.

Florida State, crowned by four of the five polls, is the new No. 1 team, replacing intrastate rival Florida, which dropped to third after losing a midweek game to North Florida and dropping the weekend series against LSU at home. After Kentucky and Texas A&M check in at Nos. 2 and 4 respectively, it's a bit of a free-for-all as the polls often disagreed on who belonged where.

The standings:

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A few more observations:

* Baseball America's poll this week seems to have made too dramatic of a shift, with a number of rankings not jiving with other polls as well as the computer ratings. Rice is obviously overranked at No. 9 (with a BCS ranking of 14) and UCLA is underranked at 17 (BCS 12).

*But the most egregious ranking belongs to Collegiate Baseball, putting Stanford at 16 when no other poll had the Cardinal lower than seventh and a BCS ranking of 5.

* Sam Houston State checks in at BCS No. 23, getting ranked in both Baseball America and Collegiate Baseball. The Bearkats vaulted over Lone Star rival Texas, which is 30th despite being ranked by all five polls.

* This week's conference breakdown: ACC (6), SEC (6), Pac-12 (6), Big 12 (3), Conference USA (3), WCC (2), Big Ten (1), Big East (1), Big West (1), Southland (1), WAC (1).

College Baseball BCS (April 3)

By Samuel Chi

This week's College Baseball BCS standings are perhaps even more revealing than last week's in terms of identifying teams that are ranked too high or too low in the human polls. They also show which polls are on shakier grounds, especially when it comes to ranking the lower teams in the top 25.

I made one change in the standings (only in the display, not in the formula), so that the poll rankings are no longer listed in reverse order. I think this brings more clarity when viewing the standings. I've also made this change to last week's standings as well.

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A few observations from this week's standings:

* Clearly, North Carolina State is the most under-ranked team. The Wolfpack are in the top 10 in both the RPI and ISR and yet placed no higher than 13th in the polls and are not even in the NCBWA's top 25. The most over-ranked team might be, ahem, Cal State Fullerton. The Titans are on the edges of the top 20 in the computer rankings, but are in the top 16 of every poll and as high as 10th.

* The bottom part of the NCBWA's poll is quite befuddling. It has Oklahoma at No. 22 - the only poll that has OU ranked anywhere - and it's an absurdity when you consider that the Sooners' No. 92 RPI rating is by far the worst among the teams in this week's standings. The NCBWA and the USA Today coaches poll also continue to over-rank Georgia, which at No. 54 in the RPI is also obviously not a top-25 team.

* Why did the Titans drop in all the polls after a respectable road split and winning two of three against Cal State Northridge? It didn't help that the Sun Devils went on to get swept at Oregon, but Fullerton now can ill afford not to sweep series against the weaker Big West teams. The toughest part of the Titans' schedule is over and they really need to steamroll the rest of the Big West, which is not very good, to stay up in the rankings.

* This week's conference breakdown: SEC (8), ACC (7), Pac-12 (6), Big 12 (4), C-USA (3), WCC (2), Southland (2), Big Ten (1), Big East (1), Big West (1), Southern (1), WAC (1).

College Baseball BCS (March 27)

By Samuel Chi

Imagine a BCS for college baseball ...

OK, check that, it'll probably make you barf. But let's say we can import the concept of the BCS standings for college baseball, at least for regular season use.

Why? Because as popularity of the game increases, there's more information than ever at our fingertips. There are five major polls and two credible ratings systems that we have to get through each week. Each poll and computer ranking is unique, but none is so superior that we can disregard all others.

As the BCS Guru during the other part of the year, I'm of course intimately familiar with the BCS standings and its inner-workings. To be sure, the standings are flawed (which I won't get into now), but it's not completely without merit. First and foremost, it blends the elements of human subjectivity and computer objectivity. It's the eyeball test meets the cold-hard data.

So I've decided to use the concept but flip it on its head. The problem with the current BCS standings is that there's too much human influence but no transparency. With that in mind, I've decided to return the primacy to the computers, which only makes sense because if anything, the college baseball polls are even more subjective and biased than college football polls.

What I come up with is the following formula with two-thirds of the standings involving computer rankings and the other one-third human polls:

* RPI (1/3) - As compiled at Boyd's World, the tool that the selection committee relies most heavily on to determine postseason seendings and berths

* Iterative Strength Ratings or ISR (1/3) - This is Boyd Nation's own computer ratings, which is less biased than the RPI and gives more weight to strength of schedule

* Five polls (1/3) - Baseball America, Collegiate Baseball, Perfect Game USA, USA Today Coaches Poll and NCBWA, with the lowest ranking for each team discarded

We only include teams that appeared in the top 25 in at least one of the above components. Thus, if a team is not ranked by any of the polls or does not appear in either computer rating's top 25, it will not be part of the standings. With that in mind, here's our inaugural College Baseball BCS Standings:

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A few observations from our first rankings:

* More than anything, this weeds out teams that are grossly overrated in human polls. Case-in-point is Georgia, which is No. 18 on two polls but not in the top 25 here.

* RPI and ISR ratings fluctuate more in the early part of the season, which is why just like the BCS standings, we waited until about the halfway point of the season to unveil our first standings. The computer ratings are from Monday, the same day the polls come out, to provide a clear cutoff and some consistency.

* The strength of the conferences is in clear display here, the most notable being the continuing decline of the Big West Conference, which does not have another team in the rankings besides Cal State Fullerton. As it is, this does not bode well for the Titans as they enter conference play.

* Complete breakdown by conference among the 40 ranked teams: SEC (9), ACC (8), Pac-12 (6), Big 12 (4), West Coast (3), Conference USA (2), Southland (2), Big Ten (1), Big East (1), Big West (1), Big South (1), Missouri Valley (1), WAC (1).