It was always a long shot, but the NCAA confirmed what every UK baseball fan already figured: that Lexington is not hosting a NCAA baseball regional.
In fact, there’s not a regional even coming close. Fellow SEC members Georgia and LSU are hosting and there are three Carolina area schools hosting (North Carolina in Cary, NC, North Carolina State and Coastal Carolina).
Brett Dawson of the Courier-Journal has the entire regional host list.
And that’s about as close as it gets. The good news is that Rivals now has UK slotted a two seed, instead of a iffy three seed. It seems like the sweep of Tennessee and near-sweep of Ole Miss was a good finish in the eyes of most.
The other good news is that this site has nine SEC teams making the regionals (which may be iffy, since that would suggest that one team who didn’t make the conference tournament is in).
The bad news? Rivals puts UK in the Houston regional against constant baseball powerhouse Rice. The Owls are currently No. 5 in the nation and made quite a run in the College World Series last year.
Some notes on Rice: They’ve been to Omaha SIX times since 1997. That’s roughly every other year. Their coach, Wayne Graham, has been around forever and knows his stuff (no disrespect to John Cohen). They are lead by Diego Seastrunk, who boasts a team high 54 RBI’s and a .374 average on a team that could possibly out-slug the Cats on both team’s best day.
So it’s not real comforting if that’s where the Cats land. To be honest with you, there’s not probably no easy road for UK, as the closest/more familiar teams they would play are really good and the farther away they go, travel and the unknown await.
The complete selection show is on ESPN at 12:30 pm eastern today. I’ll be watching, you should too.