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Temperature Extremes

We're a few weeks into the season, now (OK, that's absurdly vague; we're somewhere between seven weeks and five days into the season, depending on who you are), so it's time to figure out who's really fired out of the gates and who's still spinning their wheels. I'm going to try to keep this interesting (now, there's a switch), so I'll ignore the obvious; it's not exactly shocking that last year's championship finalists are sitting at #1 and #2 in the ISR's (although it's probably a little unusual historically).

Tulane appears to be for real; a rare case of a scout-driven preseason ranking being justified in real life. The series loss to Fullerton was disappointing, but they almost recoved in time to pull out the Saturday game and salvaged Sunday, so the takeaways aren't too bad given the Friday slaughter. I'd like to see them beat a top 10 opponent (LSU might end up being one, but they're not yet), but for now they're on target. I suspect all of LSU, Pepperdine, and Arizona State are better than their ISR's to date show, which reflects well on the Gumbies.

Louisiana-Lafayette has one big quality win over Wichita State and a couple of fairly strong wins over the top end of the Southland Conference and have cleaned up against most of their weaker competition; there's a small chance that LSU may be the third best team in the state this year.

Southern California has struggled a bit against the very toughest part of their schedule -- they're 1-4 against Stanford, Rice, and TAMU -- but they have their heads above water at this point. The rest of the non-conference schedule is a bit softer, and they look likely to break .500 in conference, so at the very least a return to the postseason seems sure this year.

Wichita State and Arkansas have done just about everything they could to date, but they've underscheduled -- both may be eventual #1 seeds, and both may fall off a bit from this point. I'm beginning to think that there almost needs to be some special handling in the ISR algorithm for Hawaii-Hilo.

Arizona State is in trouble. They haven't really been that bad -- they're sitting at #47 in the ISR's this week, and they've beaten some good teams in Baylor, UNC, and ECU, but the overall record is sitting at 13-12, and their unavoidable problems with mid-week scheduling means that their aren't that many cheap wins left: Their remaining non-conference schedule is three against Oklahoma this weekend, three gimmes against Wright State, and one against Utah Valley State. They need to get at least two this weekend in order to reduce the pressure they're going to feel trying to stay near .500 in conference -- they're significantly better than WSU and UCLA and about even with Cal, but they're looking up at everyone else at this point.

Georgia didn't schedule strongly enough to have to worry too much about missing the tournament (unless they fall down to the last couple of spots in the SEC), but they have to be a bit worried at this point with series losses to both Louisville and Georgia Southern and no really strong wins to balance them.

Oral Roberts was one of the pleasant surprises of last year, but this year's team is sitting at only 6-6 against D1 competition. Winning only one of three against Baylor and a surprisingly strong BYU team is understandable, but they've also tripped up against an average South Alabama team and against a decidedly bad UT-San Antonio squad.

This means absolutely nothing, ignore it.

This is one generic layman's predictions for who gets in the tournament. I'm not going to bother picking a team from the one-bid conferences, since the conference tournament will just be a crapshoot, but if I only list one team from a conference, they'll get an at large bid if they don't get the automatic bid.

America East   Louisiana-Lafayette    Michigan             Southern California
A10            College of Charleston  Rutgers              California
CAA            Miami, Florida         Winthrop             Louisiana State
Horizon        Florida State          Coastal Carolina     Mississippi
MAAC           North Carolina         UC Irvine            South Carolina
MAC            Georgia Tech           Long Beach State     Florida
MEAC           Clemson                Cal State Fullerton  Arkansas
Ivy            North Carolina State   UC Riverside         Alabama
Brigham Young  Central Florida        Texas Christian      Auburn
NEC            Florida Atlantic       East Carolina        Vanderbilt
OVC            Texas                  Tulane               Georgia
Patriot        Texas A&M              Oregon State         Mississippi State
SWAC           Nebraska               Stanford             Northwestern State
WCC            Texas Tech             Arizona State        Texas State
Oral Roberts   Baylor                 Washington           Rice
Wichita State  Ohio State             Arizona              Hawaii

Rather than keep returning to the subject of pitch counts and pitcher usage in general too often for my main theme, I'm just going to run a standard feature down here where I point out potential problems; feel free to stop reading above this if the subject doesn't interest you. This will just be a quick listing of questionable starts that have caught my eye -- the general threshold for listing is 120 actual pitches or 130 estimated, although short rest will also get a pitcher listed if I catch it. Don't blame me; I'm just the messenger.

(*) Pitch count is estimated.

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Boyd's World-> Breadcrumbs Back to Omaha-> Temperature Extremes

About the author, Boyd Nation