New college baseball bracket predictions, during the first week of May

(Editor's note: The following was first published on d1baseball.com. Use code Save30 for a discount on an annual subscription.)

With 11 weeks in the books, the postseason picture remains fluid from week to week, but a few things remain constant: LSU and Wake Forest remain projected to earn the top two seeds in the NCAA tournament, where they have remained in all of our projections since midseason. Vanderbilt, South Carolina, Arkansas and Florida have all joined LSU and Wake as top-eight seeds in every projection since our April 6 midseason field, and they remain in that position, albeit with a little shuffling.

Duke and Stanford moved up into top-eight position this week, replacing Coastal Carolina and Virginia. The Cavaliers fell all the way out of regional hosting position after losing their fourth series in the last five weeks. New hosts this week include Miami, Oklahoma State and Indiana State, replacing Virginia, UConn (which is starting to face some RPI issues) and Indiana (which got swept by Maryland in a critical Big Ten battle this past weekend).

Our field also features the following changes to our projected automatic qualifiers since last week:

Big Ten: Maryland replaces Indiana (Hoosiers remain in the field as an at-large team)

CAA: Northeastern replaces UNCW (Seahawks drop out of the field)

Ivy: Harvard replaces Columbia

MWC: San Diego State replaces San Jose State

Southland: Incarnate Word replaces Nicholls

And here are our at-large changes from last week:

IN: North Carolina, Washington, Auburn, Kansas State

OUT: Virginia Tech, TCU, Southern California, and the second CAA team (since Northeastern moves from at-large to automatic qualifier)

The SEC has the most projected bids with 11, although we expect that number will probably shrink as the bubble tightens. The ACC is next with 10, followed by the Pac-12 (six), Big 12 (five), Big Ten and Sun Belt (three apiece).

Mark Etheridge, Kendall Rogers and Aaron Fitt assembled the postseason projections. 

AT-LARGE LADDER:

Last five in to last five out, from strongest to weakest:

60. NC State
61. UTSA
62. Troy
63. Texas Tech
64. Georgia
—–CUTOFF—–
65. UC Irvine
66. Texas State
67. Elon
68. Virginia Tech
69. Michigan State