- Joined
- May 8, 2002
- Posts
- 1,263,606
- Reaction score
- 59
You must be registered for see images attach
UNC baseball coach Scott Forbes during a press conference on Thursday, May 28, 2026, at Boshamer Stadium. | Rodd Baxley/The Fayetteville Observer / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Welcome to the last tournament of the 2025-26 NCAA school year and arguably one of the most difficult to win. Unlike most other tournaments that are single elimination and bracket luck will exist along the way, the NCAA Baseball Tournament forces you to get through multiple formats in order to hoist the title. You have two formats before you even get to the College World Series, to win it you’ll be in Omaha for multiple weeks, and you’ll once again have multiple formats. Yes there is bracket luck, but to win you’re going to have to prove you are a good all-around team.
In case you need a reminder of how the NCAA Baseball Tournament works, keep reading. If not, you can skip to the next paragraph. The good news as a fan is that once you make the NCAA Baseball Tournament you’re guaranteed two games. All 64 teams are broken into 16 pods, each seeded one through four with the one seed being the team that has a national seed. That region is matched up in the bracket with another region where each winner will face off the following weekend and that’s where the national seeds play out. Like every other tournament the one seed is matched with the sixteen, and so on. Once you get to the next round, aka the “Super Regionals,” the lowest seeded team hosts and the two teams play a best of three weekend series like how you play throughout the year. Those winners advance to Omaha and the College World Series. Those eight are basically broken back into four team pools where the same rules as the first weekend apply, then those pool winners play a best of three series for the title.
Got that? Good, so this year Carolina’s region includes ECU, Tennessee, and tonight’s opponent VCU. The winner of this region faces off against the Winner of the Texas A&M Regional and Carolina would host. After that, Carolina’s side of the pool would include the winner of the UCLA/West Virginia regionals, Southern Miss/Florida Regionals, and Nebraska/Auburn regionals. If seeds hold it would be UCLA, Florida, Carolina, Auburn but despite the punishing format seeds almost never hold.
It all starts tonight and it starts with a bit of a change. In previous tournaments, Scott Forbes has opted to keep his pitching rotation exactly as it had been with the usual Friday/Saturday/Sunday starters. This season, though, Forbes has decided to match the moves of ECU and Tennessee and save his normal Friday starter Jason DeCaro for Saturday. So whatever the result today, it’ll be ace versus ace in the Saturday game. Our own Akil Guruparan—who wrote our preview of UNC Baseball going into the postseason if you need to catch up— has a theory as to why Forbes made the move:
Carolina has been pretty consistent against teams of the VCU caliber this season, so the calculated move here does seem to make a lot of sense when staring down the barrel of either a heated baseball rival in ECU or a strong SEC squad in Tennessee both pitching their aces. We’ll see tonight if it works.
One other note about tonight’s game—because good luck getting tickets—ESPN does an outstanding job covering this tournament by making sure there are quality announcing teams assigned to each region. Carolina drew arguably the best one with Mike Monaco and Ben McDonald. Monaco’s star is rising quickly at ESPN, and his voice may be familiar for a couple of reasons. He just called a couple of Carolina Hurricanes wins in their series against the Philadelphia Flyers, but for UNC baseball fans his voice will be familiar for that magic run two seasons ago where the Tar Heels seemingly won every game in the last inning and his calls were electric.
It speaks to just how competitive this regional likely will be.
So if you weren’t lucky enough to get tickets to the Bosh tonight, here’s how you can catch the action:
- Time: 5:00 PM ET
- Location: Boshamer Stadium, Chapel Hill, NC
- Streaming: Tonight’s game is going to be a streaming only affair, on ESPN+ To access it, you’re going to need to either subscribe to ESPN+ or ESPN Unlimited. If you subscribe to a cable service some now have agreements with ESPN to where you’ll have access already included.
- Radio: WCHL 97.9 in Chapel Hill as well as online and through the Varsity app. Dave Nathan will take you through the game for the Tar Heels, and it’s free.
Continue reading...
