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NC State head coach Elliott Avent (Photo by Howard Eakin/Getty Images)
Selection Monday always leaves a trail of celebration and frustration in its wake. Some teams saw months of strong work validated with favorable seeds, hosting opportunities and clear postseason paths. Others were left staring at glaring omissions, difficult draws or committee decisions that will be debated long after the bracket was revealed.
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Below, Baseball America breaks down the biggest winners and losers from the 2026 NCAA Tournament field announcement.
Winners
UCLA Bruins
It would have taken a genuine seeding mistake for UCLA to end up anywhere but the winners side of this exercise.
The committee handed the Bruins what appears to be one of the cleanest regional paths in the tournament. UCLA will host Virginia Tech, a surprising two-seed that we projected as a three for weeks, alongside Cal Poly, which needed the Big West automatic bid to reach the field, and WCC champion Saint Mary’s.
Nothing is guaranteed in this sport, especially in a format that routinely produces chaos. Still, it would register as one of the more stunning regional exits in recent memory if the Bruins failed to advance from this group.
Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets
Georgia Tech fits comfortably into the same category as UCLA. The Yellow Jackets drew a regional that features an Oklahoma team that has cooled considerably over the last six weeks, an increasingly dangerous but still manageable Citadel club and UIC. None of those teams have pitched at a level that suggests they can consistently slow the nation’s most explosive offense.
Georgia Tech has erased a 10-run deficit this season and spent months making even sizable leads feel temporary. Oklahoma at its best could present some resistance, but there simply are not many teams in this field capable of matching the Yellow Jackets offensively or controlling them on the mound long enough to survive a regional format.
Strength of Schedule
In a world where the balance of resume metrics seems to shift annually, one category appeared to tower above the rest on Selection Monday: strength of schedule.
It was the justification committee chair Michael Alford pointed to when explaining Mercer’s omission and it was impossible to ignore the role it played in Troy’s inclusion. Troy played the toughest schedule by a mid-major since South Florida in 2018. The fact it finished only modestly above .500 overall seemingly mattered less than the willingness to schedule aggressively in the first place.
So, for mid-major coaches searching for a roadmap, the message appeared straightforward: schedule ambitiously or risk watching your wins get dismissed.
Sort of.
Jacksonville State won 46 games, posted the No. 25 RPI and still landed on the three-seed line despite a No. 186 strength of schedule. Boston College, meanwhile, secured a two-seed despite a No. 260 non-conference strength of schedule. NC State reached the field comfortably despite finishing below .500 in ACC play, outside the top 50 in RPI and with a non-conference strength of schedule ranked No. 242. Tennessee earned a two-seed with a non-conference strength of schedule outside the top 180 while Liberty, which had the No. 32 RPI, won 41 games, reached its conference championship game and played a top-40 non-conference schedule, barely snuck into the field as one of the final at-large selections.
That is what made Monday difficult to fully process. The committee spoke as though strength of schedule carried enormous weight. In some cases, it clearly did. In others, it appeared almost irrelevant.
So perhaps the lesson for mid-major programs is to schedule tougher.
Or perhaps the reality is far more frustrating: nobody seems entirely sure which metrics will matter from one team sheet to the next.
NC State Wolfpack
NC State was unquestionably one of Selection Monday’s biggest winners.
At the most basic level, this was a true bubble team and it made the field. That alone qualifies as a significant victory given how delicate the Wolfpack’s position appeared entering the final days of the season.
But the significance of the bid extends beyond simple bracket inclusion.
This is the proper ending for Elliott Avent, the winningest coach in program history and one of the winningest coaches the sport has ever seen. Avent spent 30 years building NC State into a nationally relevant program and, fairly or unfairly, part of his legacy will always be tied to the 2021 team that was removed from the College World Series because of COVID-19 protocols while appearing fully capable of reaching the national championship series.
One final opportunity to chase the ending that season never received feels deserved.
Remove the emotion from the equation and NC State still had a credible at-large case, too. The Wolfpack’s inclusion was defensible on merit. The fact it also allows one of the sport’s defining coaches another crack at the postseason only makes the outcome feel more fitting.
Teams That Gamed Their RPI
This is not some grand exposé naming the programs I believe gamed the system. Readers can draw their own conclusions there.
But this season, more than perhaps any other in recent memory, there was a noticeable wave of teams abandoning late-season midweek games in ways that just so happened to protect their RPIs. The practice became prominent enough that Alford distributed a memo warning coaches that such decisions would be considered during selection deliberations.
Conversations with sources, however, made it clear the committee was never truly positioned to enforce that idea in a meaningful way.
That is understandable. The NCAA does not currently have a uniform policy governing those cancellations nor does it have an established framework for distinguishing between legitimate circumstances and obvious resume protection. Sometimes those situations are murky. Other times they are not. But without a defined standard, the committee was left trying to navigate a gray area with little real authority to punish teams it believed acted in bad faith.
So, at least for now, the programs that benefited from manipulating the margins came out ahead.
That said, there does appear to be genuine interest from the committee in addressing the issue moving forward. That’s because this year made one thing abundantly clear: coaches across the country have identified a loophole and more of them are willing to use it so long as it remains consequence-free in practice.
Power 4 Programs
There is no reason to belabor this point because, at this stage, it is firmly established reality: the Power Four wins Selection Monday.
Mercer, UTSA and even teams like High Point, Kent State, Miami (Ohio) and Southeast Missouri State will spend this postseason at home. To be clear, this is not an argument that every one of those teams unequivocally belonged in the field. It is simply an acknowledgment that the sport’s balance of power has tilted dramatically toward the major conferences in a way that would have been difficult to imagine even five years ago.
Kentucky serves as the clearest example of that reality. The Wildcats lost eight of their final nine weekends and still comfortably made the tournament. That is not necessarily an indictment of Kentucky itself because, frankly, Kentucky probably is one of the 64 best teams in the country based on talent and underlying quality.
But Selection Monday is supposed to be about resume evaluation, not theoretical ability alone. At some point, it is fair to ask where the line actually exists between rewarding conference affiliation and rewarding the season that was played.
That question grows harder to answer every year.
Losers
Mercer Bears
I wrote extensively about Mercer’s omission from the field and why I believed the Bears deserved a place in the tournament. You can read that here. I believe that as strongly now as I did when I wrote it. With every fiber of my being, I think Mercer should be playing this weekend.
And to be clear, this is not a shot at another team that made the field. I am not particularly interested in turning this into a binary argument about who should have been removed. My point is simpler than that: Mercer did enough to warrant inclusion and still watched Selection Monday from the outside.
That is brutal for the program, brutal for its players and, brutal for a sport that increasingly asks mid- and low-major programs to clear impossibly specific and sometimes contradictory hurdles just to receive consideration. Last year Xavier scheduled tougher than anyone and was told it needed to win more games. This year Mercer won a bunch of games but needed to schedule tougher while Troy, which didn’t win a bunch of games but scheduled as hard as anyone, made the field.
Mercer is the biggest loser of Selection Monday because the Bears should still be alive.
Nebraska Cornhuskers
Nebraska drew such a difficult regional that it might not even qualify as a true upset if the Cornhuskers fail to advance.
Toward the end of the regular season, we identified Arizona State and Ole Miss as arguably the two most dangerous non-host teams in the entire field, clubs capable of making legitimate championship runs despite being sent on the road. Somehow, both ended up in Lincoln.
And the challenge hardly stops there. Four-seed Northeastern has been one of the steadiest one-bid league representatives in the country and enters the tournament fully capable of making life uncomfortable for anyone in the bracket.
That is an absolutely brutal draw for a host. Nebraska earned the right to play at home. It just might not have received much of a reward for doing so.
North Carolina Tar Heels
The same can be said for North Carolina, which drew one of the most dangerous regionals in the tournament despite earning a top-eight national seed.
Tennessee, East Carolina and VCU is an exceptionally difficult combination. ECU and VCU both led their respective conferences in ERA and each roster features legitimate professional talent capable of swinging games in a short format. Tennessee, meanwhile, has spent much of the season operating as a sleeping giant, dragged down by inconsistency on both sides of the ball but still possessing as much raw talent as nearly any two-seed in the field.
When the Volunteers are playing clean baseball, they look fully capable of advancing out of virtually any regional in the country. That makes this an awfully unforgiving draw for a North Carolina club that otherwise put together a season that could have been rewarded with a lighter path.
Jacksonville State Gamecocks
Jacksonville State wound up in a strange middle ground on Selection Monday.
On one hand, the Gamecocks were absolutely underseeded as a three. A 46-win team with a top-25 RPI, a regular-season and conference tournament title in a multi-bid Conference USA and one of the best overall resumes among mid-majors should not be sitting on the three line. Jacksonville State felt much closer to a low-end two-seed than a typical regional three and its placement was another reminder of just how difficult it has become for mid-major programs to truly break through on Selection Monday.
At the same time, there is at least a small silver lining here.
Because the committee slotted Jacksonville State as a three, it landed in a non-top-eight seed regional rather than being sent into a more difficult national seed group.
Regardless, this is not a normal three-seed. Jacksonville State can really pitch, it has proven all season it can sustain winning over the long haul and its underlying metrics have backed up the record for months. This feels much more like a dangerous underseeded club than a typical tertiary piece in a regional bracket.
The little guys
Mid- and low-major programs once again walked away from Selection Monday reminded of just how narrow the path to an at-large bid has become.
Teams like Mercer, Jacksonville State, UTSA and others built resumes that, in previous eras of the sport, likely would have been enough to feel considerably safer entering the day. Instead, they were either left out entirely or pushed down the seed list in favor of power conference clubs with more uneven overall results.
That does not mean every committee decision was wrong. It does mean the margin for error between major conferences and everyone else continues to grow wider every season.
