The 2025 NCAA baseball Tournament is officially here, and the first games of each region were played yesterday, and while there were some surprises on the field, if this is your first time watching college baseball, you may be wondering why the teams that lost yesterday are not automatically eliminated. Well, let’s try to give those fans a rundown of exactly how the regional round works and how it gets determined who plays who and when.
Every region consists of four teams, and for this example, we will be using the Oxford region, whose four teams are the Ole Miss Rebels, the Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets, the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers, and the Murray State Racers.
Teams are seeded one through for in the region, with the one seed being viewed as the best team, and the four seed being viewed as the worst team.
In the first round of games, the one seed will play the four seed, and the two seed will play the three seed. The winner of those two will play each other, while the losers will play each other in the next round. The winner of the losers matchup will play the loser of the winners matchup, while the loser of the losers matchup will be eliminated and the winner of the winners matchup will receive a next round bye. The winner of the winners matchup will play the winner of that last matchup, resulting in a possible two game series, with the first team to get their second loss of the tournament being eliminated. Think of it this way. It is double elimination, so once you lose your second game, you will be eliminated from the tournament.
The winner of the entire region will compete in a Super Regional best-of-three series against the winner of the other region in their bracket, in this case, it would be the Athens region.
From there, the final eight teams will gather at Omaha to compete in the College World Series. The process for the regional round repeats, splitting the eight winners of the Super Regional rounds into two sets of four, and then the two winners of those will face each other in the College World Series Final in a best-of-three series.