Indiana is being projected as a regional host in most major publications. Is this a realistic projection?
By Carl James @jovian34 April 22nd, 2023 – photo by Zach Greene
This past Tuesday and Wednesday saw most of the major college baseball publications projecting the Indiana Hoosiers to be named as one of NCAA Division I’s top-16 national seeds and regional host teams. The unanimous nature of the projections caught me frankly off guard. I follow D1Baseball in particular. On Monday, D1 dropped five teams out of their top-25 rankings, but still left Indiana out.
So what happened between Monday and Wednesday? The obvious answer is that Indiana “upset” Louisville on Tuesday night on ESPNU and looked really good doing it. The less obvious answer is that the analysis and metrics used to evaluate the rankings of teams are clearly different than those used for tournament seeding. D1’s staff, for example, still says that per the “eye test” Maryland is the most talented team in the Big Ten (B1G). That eye test only go so far with the NCAA Committee, which uses the Ratings Percentage Index (RPI) as it’s key metric and Indiana is ranked 12th, while Maryland is 65th.
All of these publications say that they are “projecting”, but there is clearly a now bias in what we are seeing. My favorite tool for projecting is Boyd’s World’s RPI needs report. This report lays out what the path is to a top-45 (at-large 3-seed), top-32 (2-seed) and top-16 (host) for each team. For Indiana the path to hosting is any combination of 15 wins in the final 17 games. That is 15-2 down the stretch. This includes series hosting Maryland and Purdue and traveling to Michigan State. Assuming no other slip up, this requires winning all three of those series, and sweeping one of them. If you look at what’s happened in the B1G so far this season, I have a hard time projecting that to happen. I’m not saying it can’t happen, but it would be a continuation of the extremely level performance we have seen since mid-March.
What I want to stress above all else is that while hosting is a possibility, it can’t be the assumed bar of success. This team gets into a regional for the first time since 2019 and that will be the mark of a successful season as far as on-the-field win/loss results go. 10 more wins (10-7 to finish the season) is probably good enough to achieve that. A result in-between 10 and 17 wins is very likely. My own projection model has Indiana finishing with an RPI rank of 31st. That is a solid 2-seed, particularly if they can manage to win a B1G Title (either regular season or at the B1G Tourney in May).
Now, If Indiana gets close to the 45-win mark and makes a decent run in Omaha in May, I will argue hotly for NCAA Baseball at Bart Kaufman Field. I just can’t objectively project that is likely to happen. If you are disappointed by this, take solace in knowing that my ability to project this year is clearly lacking, particularly if you take my B1G Pick’em performance into account.