College softball bracketology: Where does Wichita State stand for NCAA regional bid?
Things were back to normal for the Wichita State softball team in its first game in the American Athletic Conference tournament Thursday.
Addison Barnard smacked two home runs to move up to No. 3 all-time in NCAA history with 32 home runs this season, Sydney McKinney collected five hits to break her own single-season hits record and Lauren Mills tied an NCAA record with two grand slams, as Wichita State won 22-0 in a run-rule victory over Memphis in Greenville, North Carolina.
The offensive explosion was a welcomed sight after the Shockers scored six combined runs in two straight losses last weekend against UCF with the AAC regular-season title on the line. It was a missed opportunity for WSU, not only to win back-to-back conference titles but also to all but lock up a bid to an NCAA Regional against a top-25 opponent at home.
The Shockers are confident they have proven throughout this season they belong in the postseason with their 32-15 record and RPI of 37 entering Friday. They have two potential All-Americans in Barnard and McKinney, who leads the country in batting average. They have one of the most explosive offenses in the country, launching more home runs than every other team other than Oklahoma. But many bracketology projections consider WSU dangerously close to the cut line with the selection show on Sunday.
“You don’t ever want to be too confident,” WSU coach Kristi Bredbenner said. “But for us, we’re just focused on this weekend. We know we have a good enough team to win this conference tournament, so we’re taking it one game at a time. We can’t control what happens next week. All we can control is each day of this tournament, so hopefully we can come away with three wins.”
WSU now has an enticing matchup in the AAC tournament semifinals at 11 a.m. Friday against a fellow bubble team in South Florida, which has a 42-13 record and a No. 39 RPI and is also armed with one of the best pitchers in the nation in Georgina Corrick (34-5, 0.44 ERA).
Could that essentially be a play-in game for the postseason? It’s possible, but the AAC did send three teams to NCAA Regionals last season and the hope would be that both teams, along with conference champion UCF, would again make it to the postseason this time around.
But the Shockers learned just how hard it is to predict what the NCAA selection committee is thinking after last season when WSU swept the AAC titles, entered with a top-25 national ranking and a No. 24 RPI, only to be assigned a No. 3 seed in the Norman Regional against overall No. 1 seed Oklahoma.
Despite a few more losses this season, Bredbenner is confident WSU’s resume stacks up against power-conference teams because of how difficult its nonconference slate was.
“I think playing a tough schedule prepares you for this time of the year,” Bredbenner said. “We’re going to consistently schedule aggressively as a program because we want to measure ourselves against some of the best teams and know where we stand early. That’s allowed us to have the strength of schedule to be in the situation we’re in right now with our RPI in position to get us an at-large bid.”
WSU is likely being compared to teams in the same range in the RPI, which features major-conference teams like Illinois (34-19), Minnesota (26-24), Oregon State (31-18), Wisconsin (27-18), Texas A&M (29-26), Louisville (27-25) and Arizona (32-18) and a few mid-major powers in Western Kentucky (35-12) and Boise State (37-10).
On paper, the Shockers stack up favorably with a 14-14 record against top-100 RPI opponents, a better winning percentage than Minnesota (16-22), Oregon State (13-16), Wisconsin (16-17), Texas A&M (15-26), Louisville (16-22), Arizona (14-18) and Utah (13-24) and more top-100 wins than South Florida (10), Western Kentucky (10) and Boise State (7).
WSU was likely helped by the early exit by Texas A&M (SEC), Minnesota (Big 10), Louisville (ACC) and Western Kentucky (Conference USA) in their conference tournaments. The Shockers will be scoreboard watching the the Pac-12 series between Oregon State-Utah and Arizona-Stanford this week, as well.
The knock on WSU will be its lack of marquee wins, as the victory over UCF (No. 16 RPI) is the lone top-25 win of the season and the Shockers were 1-7 against top-25 competition. WSU did finish 13-7 against opponents ranked between No. 26-100 in the RPI, which is tied for the second-most total wins of the 12 bubble teams ranked No. 34-45 in the RPI and tied for the third-best winning percentage.
Bredbenner believes that body of work will be enough for the Shockers to hear their names called on Sunday night, which she pointed out is an impressive feat for a team that lost five starters from last season’s team and also three potential starters in Arielle James, Bailey Urban and Camryn Compton early this season.
“This team was relatively young and inexperienced coming into the season, so what this group has done has been fantastic,” Bredbenner said. “People forget how much we lost and then who we lost at the start of this season because we’ve been so successful. But to me, this was a pretty big rebuilding year and these girls achieved more than most people would have expected given all of those circumstances.”
This story was originally published May 12, 2022 at 1:18 PM.
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