The ACC championship in college baseball has followed an incredibly similar and basic format since 2006. For the first time, all sixteen teams will earn the opportunity to compete for an ACC Championship, regardless of their regular season conference record.
The Atlantic Coast Conference has announced that all sixteen teams will make the tournament, which will now consist of single elimination bracket play, with certain teams earning byes to the later rounds.
In this new format, the first, second, third and fourth seed will earn a bye until the quarterfinals, meaning they would only need to win three games to win the tournament and the conference.
The fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth seed will earn a bye to the second round, letting them pass the first round of games.
This is significantly different from the older model, which had only allowed twelve teams to make the cut. These teams would then compete in “pool play” within a three team pool. The winners of each pool would advance to the bracket which would consist of four teams.
This would ultimately lead to games being played in pool play with no meaning, as both teams in the contest could have already been eliminated from advancing.
Allowing all sixteen programs an opportunity to win the tournament provides a unique opportunity for an automatic berth to the college baseball bracket. This unique opportunity will provide teams who begin playing well late in the season an opportunity they may have never previously earned the chance to compete for.
However, this new format ensures that the teams who performed better throughout the regular season earn an important advantage over the other programs that fell to the bottom of the standings.
The ACC continues to be generally viewed as one of the premier conferences in the world of college baseball, as they sent eight teams to the NCAA tournament last season, and four teams to Omaha, Nebraska for the Men’s College World Series.
The ACC Championship will begin on Tuesday, May 20th and continue through Sunday, May 25th at Durham Bulls Athletic Park.
