To win a national championship, teams must conquer a marathon shifting between different formats and phases: a multi-team Regional, a head-to-head Super Regional and a historic College World Series that includes separate double-elimination and best-of-three formats. Kicking off next weekend, the 64-team bracket is set to unveil its full complement of teams on Monday after 29 conference champions are joined by 35 at-large selections.
For the second time in four years, Boston College expects to hear its name called as one of those teams slotted into a regional selection, so understanding the format and its history is a key component in what to expect when the NCAA broadcasts its selection show on the ESPN family of networks in the middle of the Memorial Day holiday.
“I’m grateful that we competed as hard as we did in the regular season,” said head coach Todd Interdonato after the Eagles dropped an 8-2 decision to Miami in the Atlantic Coast Conference’s postseason quarterfinal round. “I’m certainly looking forward to [this] week, and we are going to put our best foot forward, this whole week, to get ready to make some noise in a regional.”
The tournament kicks off with the field dividing into four-team regionals set across 16 different campus sites, each of which were announced on Sunday night. Each host team is normally the No. 1 seed in the quadrant and is therefore forced to defend its home soil against lower seeds in a double-elimination bracket that spreads across the weekend. To survive a regional, a team must secure three wins before suffering two losses, and teams losing early games – specifically on the first day – are forced to navigate four consecutive games over a 48-hour period to advance out of its grouping.
This format is relatively new and is the product of the NCAA’s decision to expand its field at the start of the 21st century. Prior to 2000, a 48-team bracket spread eight regionals with a convoluted format that varied the number of teams remaining after each round. Bracket winners qualified directly into the College World Series, which was hosted annually at Johnny Rosenblatt Stadium in Omaha, Nebraska.
These regional groupings notoriously crushed teams that lost early games by forcing them to play upwards of six games over the next four days and heavily penalized teams by taxing bullpens, so the 1999 decision to expand the tournament to 64 teams ensured that teams could protect their arms while maintaining the variances associated with baseball’s day-to-day philosophy of forcing multiple games.
The new “Super Regional” round was key to the implementation and introduced baseball’s “Sweet Sixteen” for the first time. Here, the tournament underwent a radical shift and forced regional winners to play one another in a best-of-three series that was hosted by the higher-seeded team. Of the 16 regionals, eight teams received national seeds and automatic hosting rights in the Super Regional round, while the top seed in a corresponding bracket would host if the No. 1 seed ranked inside of the top-8 lost two games in its home regional.
Those eight seeds maintained an integrity to the remainder of the bracket unless their site couldn’t host that Super Regional round, but the introduction of the best-of-three added another layer that prevented a hot pitcher or fluke performance from eliminating a team within a single game. It also correlated to the eight-team format at the College World Series, which remained untouched in its own double-elimination format and single-elimination championship game.
Historically, this format paired teams along geographical alignments, but this left unintended possibilities that robbed the tournament of parity and integrity. Regionals in 2017, for example, paired Texas Tech and Florida State against one another, but the No. 5-ranked Red Raiders and No. 17-ranked Seminoles weren’t mathematically aligned with one another. Additionally, the No. 8 and No. 9 teams in the bracket – Stanford and Long Beach State – weren’t ranked next to one another in the weeks leading up to the tournament, so in 2018, the committee introduced 16 national seeds to ensure that the bracket paired the proper No. 1 seeds against one another if they all advanced.
The design is to force teams to punch their tickets to Omaha by ensuring that the “best teams” advance to the College World Series, which itself sends eight teams into two, four-team brackets that are likewise double-elimination. Prior seeding helps align teams into the correct slots to face one another in a method that’s similar to the Regionals, but the static home field in Nebraska has been in place since the tournament moved to Omaha Municipal Stadium in 1950. The current home at Charles Schwab Field Omaha opened in 2011 as TD Ameritrade Park and concurrently serves as Creighton’s home field.
All of this leads to a best-of-three national championship series between the two surviving teams, a relatively new concept that started with Rice’s 2003 championship win over Stanford. In total, this means that championship-winning teams are allowed four losses throughout their national tournament runs, and they must win 10 collective postseason games before losing two games in any individual round.
Boston College will learn its placement on Monday, May 25, 2026 at 12 p.m., when ESPN2 hosts the NCAA Division I Baseball Tournament Selection Show. All 16 sites have been announced with Georgia Tech, North Carolina and Florida State earning host capacities for the ACC. The Eagles cannot slot into a regional that’s hosted by a conference team, so that leaves one of 13 possible locations.
The remaining sites listed alphabetically, are: Athens, Ga. (Georgia); Auburn, Ala. (Auburn); Austin, Tex. (Texas); College Station, Tex. (Texas A&M); Eugene, Ore. (Oregon); Gainesville, Fla. (Florida); Hattiesburg, Miss. (Southern Mississippi); Lawrence, Kan. (Kansas); Lincoln, Neb. (Nebraska); Los Angeles, Calif. (UCLA); Morgantown, West Va. (West Virginia); Starkville, Miss. (Mississippi State); and Tuscaloosa, Ala. (Alabama) – which hosted the Eagles in 2023.
