The tournament that crowns a national champion in men’s college baseball seems unnecessarily convoluted at first glance, but it’s relatively straightforward and outrageously fun to watch.

How Does the Men’s College World Series Work?

Lest you think that basketball has some sort of monopoly on collegiate postseason tournaments packed to the gills with madness and unpredictability, the NCAA Division I men’s baseball tournament has long been just as topsy-turvy and entertaining, if not more so.

Sadly, between the tournament format being much less straightforward and lacking a great alliterative nickname on par with March Madness — June Jumble is about the best we can do — the baseball tournament is nowhere near as nationally popular as the hoops hysteria.

The College World Series always delivers, though, and this guide to postseason baseball should help get you past any barriers to entry and into the annual early-summer sensation.

The Ins and Outs of the Men’s College World Series

If you tried to fit the entire bracket for the D-I baseball tournament onto a single sheet of paper, that series of 18 double-elimination tournaments and nine best-of-three series would probably look a bit like a spider web.

Before you get tangled up in confusion, though, allow us to clear up a few key points and make it all make sense.

What's the Difference Between the NCAA Division I Baseball Tournament and the Men’s College World Series?

The NCAA Division I (D-I) Baseball Tournament is the 64-team bracket from which a national champion is crowned each June. Teams must survive the double-elimination Regionals and Super Regionals (more on those shortly) in order to qualify for the eight-team Men’s College World Series (MCWS), which is held in Omaha, Nebraska every year.

Basically, the MCWS is to the D-I Baseball Tournament as the Elite Eight is to the NCAA D-I Basketball Tournament (March Madness); or as the World Series is to the Major League Baseball postseason — though that comparison might be a bit more confusing, since the MCWS is eight teams and the MLB World Series is just a best-of-seven series between two teams.

How Are Teams Selected to Participate in the D-I Baseball Tournament?

Each D-I conference around the country is awarded one automatic bid, determined in most cases by a conference tournament held at the end of the regular season.

Those automatic bids account for a bit less than half of the 64 teams, with the rest of the field filled out by at-large bids — the teams which the Selection Committee deems were the best among those that didn’t win their conference tournament.

Both the at-large bids and seeding/ranking of all teams are based on the teams’ overall profiles at the time in late May when the field is selected. Among other data points, those profiles include win-loss record, strength of schedule (SOS) and, most notably, ratings percentage index (RPI), which is a formulaic ranking of every team in the country, based on the quality of its wins and losses.

RPI isn’t the be-all end-all. It is simply a sorting tool, and one of many aspects the selection committee considers.

How do NCAA Baseball Regionals and Super Regionals Work?

During the selection process, the committee seeds what it deems to be the 16 best teams in the country. Each of those top teams hosts one of the 16 four-team, double-elimination Regionals, provided its facilities meet the NCAA’s hosting guidelines. (This was most recently an issue in 2021, when Old Dominion was named the No. 11 overall seed, but was ineligible to host due to a lack of media seating and an inadequate television camera setup.)

Within each Regional, the team seeded in the Top 16 is the No. 1 seed (regardless of whether it is able to host) along with a No. 2 seed, No. 3 seed and No. 4 seed.

While the top 16 teams are ranked in order, we aren’t given an overall seed list for teams 17-64. The committee simply creates a pool of 16 No. 2 seeds, 16 No. 3 seeds and 16 No. 4 seeds, and then places them in Regionals, with geography and avoiding conference rematches the two primary considerations. (For instance, there were 11 SEC teams in the 2024 D-I tournament, and all 11 were sent to different Regionals.

Within each Regional, the first pair of games (typically played on a Friday) pits No. 1 vs. No. 4 and No. 2 vs. No. 3. The following day, the two losers square off and the two winners square off, with the loser of the former game eliminated from the tournament. On Sunday afternoon, the two remaining teams with one loss battle for the right to face the 2-0 team on Sunday night. If the undefeated team remains undefeated, it advances to the Super Regionals. Should the 2-1 team defeat the 2-0 team Sunday night, however, there is a winner-take-all game on Monday to determine who advances.

Thus concludes the first quarter of the tournament.

The bracket is set up in such a way that the overall seeds in each Super Regional matchup will add up to 17, if both seeded teams survive the Regionals. For instance, in the 2024 tournament, No. 1 Tennessee would have drawn No. 16 East Carolina, had the Pirates not been eliminated in Regionals. No. 2 Kentucky did face No. 15 Oregon State. And No. 7 Georgia drew No. 10 North Carolina State.

The Super Regional is simply a best-of-three series held the weekend after the Regionals round. Whether the team went 3-0 or 3-1 in its Regional is irrelevant; first team to win two games in the Super Regional advances to the College World Series.

The better seeded team hosts the Super Regional, provided its facilities were sufficient for hosting a Regional. So, in 2024, No. 7 Georgia had home-field advantage against No. 10 North Carolina State. And while No. 5 seed Arkansas would have had home-field advantage against No. 12 Virginia, the Razorbacks were eliminated in their Regional, allowing the Cavaliers to host the Super Regional.

Where it gets a bit wacky is if neither seeded team survives the first round, in which case the team that submitted the most agreeable bid (i.e. proposal for paying the NCAA revenue if selected to host) gets home-field advantage in the Super Regional. There were no cases of this in 2024, but two in 2023, with Oregon hosting Oral Roberts and Southern Miss hosting Tennessee. (The road team won both of those Super Regionals, though.)

How Many Teams Go to Omaha for the College World Series?

The 16 regionals feed into eight Super Regionals, which produce eight teams that go to Omaha for the College World Series.

Fans of those eight schools proceed to do an outrageous number of jello shots at Rocco’s Pizza & Cantina.

What Is the Structure of the College World Series?

The College World Series plays out the same way that a Regional / Super Regional octet does, with two four-team double-elimination tournaments followed by a best-of-three series between the two teams who survive.

In theory, it would be the No. 1 seed vs. the No. 8 seed and the No. 4 seed vs. No. 5 seed in the first round of one of the double-elimination tournaments, with 2-7 and 3-6 pairings in the other four-team tourney. However, in the 64-team era of the tournament, there has never been a case of the top eight teams all making it to the MCWS.

There is no re-seeding or restructuring. If the No. 1 overall seed doesn’t make it, that spot goes to whichever team won the Super Regional that the No. 1 seed was (supposed to be) in. The bracket might look like complete chaos with all the double eliminations involved, but it’s actually a fairly straightforward structure that *should* result in the No. 1 seed facing the No. 2 seed for all the marbles. (Though, that hasn’t happened since 1999, when No. 1 Miami beat No. 2 Florida State in the championship of the first 64-team tournament.)

It’s worth noting again here that records from previous rounds are irrelevant. It’s possible that one team will enter the best-of-three championship with a perfect 8-0 record, while its opponent could be 8-3 by virtue of suffering one loss in its Regional, one in its Super Regional and one in the first half of the Omaha portion of the tournament.

MLB fans should have no problem processing that part. The 2022 World Series featured one team that was 7-0 (Houston) in the postseason and another that was 9-2 (Philadelphia) in the postseason. But college basketball and college football fans trying to get into the college baseball postseason might be a bit taken aback by the notion of a national champion that could suffer as many as four losses during the nearly month-long playoff format. (Fresno State did this in 2008.)

The History of the NCAA Men’s College World Series

Save for the times when conference realignment has resulted in an adjustment to the number of automatic bids awarded, it has been more than two decades since the last time the NCAA Men’s D-I Baseball Tournament / College World Series underwent any sort of substantial facelift.

In 2018 they started seeding the top 16 teams as opposed to just the top eight, but the overall structure of needing to win a double-elimination tournament, a best-of-three series, another double-elimination tournament and another best-of-three series to secure a national championship has been the same since 2003.

Go back much further than that, though, and you’ll find it was nowhere near the invitational that it is today.

From 1947-1953, it simply was the College World Series. No Regionals or Super Regionals. Just eight teams got in and the whole thing was decided in 15 or fewer games.

The field first expanded to 23 teams in 1954, broken into eight “Districts” that produced the eventual eight-team MCWS field. The starting size of the tournament gradually crept its way up to 48 teams in 1987, before jumping to 64 (and introducing the Super Regionals) in 1999. And after four years of a winner-take-all single game for the national championship, the finals were changed to best-of-three in 2003.

As far as championship record books are concerned, Southern California leads the way with 12 titles. Most of those are ancient history, though, with just one championship (1998) coming more recently than 1978. The Trojans haven’t even made it to the semifinals of the MCWS since the tournament was expanded to 64 teams. Nevertheless, they did win it all in 12 of their 21 appearances in the College World Series.

Meanwhile, Texas is emphatically in first place for total number of MCWS appearances with 38 (from its 63 trips to the tournament). The Longhorns only have six championships to show for it, though.

But at least Texas occasionally seals the deal. Florida State has been to the College World Series 24 times (and in the tournament a total of 52 times) without winning it once. The Seminoles did take first runner-up in each of 1970, 1986 and 1999, but they are forever in pursuit of that elusive first title.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do they decide who the home teams are?

As far as the location of the game is concerned, the 16 seeded teams each host a Regional. For the Super Regionals, the host is either the higher-seeded team (where “higher” is numerically lower, meaning the 1 seed would be the host if facing the 16 seed) or the host is determined by a bidding process if neither team in the Super Regional was one of the original 16 seeded teams. And then once it gets to the College World Series, all of the games are in Omaha.

The host isn’t always the ‘home’ team, though.

The better-seeded team gets to bat last in Game 1 of the Regionals (i.e. No. 1 is home vs. No. 4 and No. 2 is home vs. No. 3.) For the remainder of Regionals, though, it’s a matter of who has gotten fewer games as the home team and a series of tiebreakers or coin flips if they are tied in that regard.

For the double-elimination portion of the College World Series, it’s the same idea.

For the Super Regionals and the championship best-of-three series, however, the better-seeded team is home for Game 1, road for Game 2 and then a coin flip decides the home team for Game 3, if that game is necessary.

How do teams qualify for the College World Series?

As previously noted, a little less than half of the 64 teams receive an automatic bid as conference champions. The vast majority of those are decided via a conference tournament, though the Big West has remained an exception that awards its automatic bid to its regular-season champion and doesn’t hold a tournament.

Beyond that, the remaining at-large teams are chosen clandestinely by the tournament selection committee.

Both on the football and basketball side of things, the NCAA has made it a point in recent years to be more transparent about the selection and seeding process for its postseason D-I tournament. Not so in baseball, though, where we don’t even find out who was the first team left out of the bracket, or how any teams beyond the top 16 were seeded.

Using data like RPI and SOS and an understanding of the geographical principles behind building the tournament, though, there are bracketologists who can reasonably predict what the committee will do.

Are there bracket pools for the College World Series like there are for March Madness?

Do bracket pools for the NCAA D-I baseball tournament exist? Absolutely.

Are they circulated at even a fraction of the rate that bracket pools for the NCAA D-I basketball tournament are? Absolutely not.

Maybe that could change one day, though. Goodness knows there’s more than enough going on in that first weekend of the baseball tournament—at least 96 games, and up to 112 games in the span of four days—to rival the madness of the first weekend of March Madness.

Sleeper: Your Source For NCAA News!

From the selection show straight through to the final pitch of the national championship, Sleeper has you covered with all the latest news and notes.

If the College World Series is your first foray into the world of baseball, we can help you out with all sorts of starter topics, like baseball rules for beginners, an explanation of baseball statistics or a primer on the positions in baseball. (Links for all when published)

Or maybe you’re in some sort of awesome fantasy college baseball league and have no clue what you’re gotten yourself into. We can help you out with tips on drafting a successful team, fantasy scoring and how fantasy baseball works in general. Those were all written with MLB in mind, but the principles should all apply to college baseball, too.

Either way, Sleeper can help you out, so give the app a download. From breaking news, to Sleeper Picks to season-long leagues, you won’t be disappointed.