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Off the Block each week throughout the rest of the regular season and during the postseason will unveil its latest detailed projections to the NCAA Tournament.
The men’s volleyball Division I-II NCAA Tournament is comprised of seven teams. Automatic bids are awarded to the winners of the Big West, ConfCarolinas, EIVA, MIVA and MPSF conference tournaments, and the NCAA men’s volleyball committee selects two teams for at-large bids.
The five-person selection committee meets following all of the conference tournaments to decide the at-large teams and the tournament seeding. The field for the NCAA Tournament is scheduled to be released Sunday.
The NCAA Tournament will begin with a play-in match and then two first-round matches. The top-two seeds will receive byes to the semifinals and will play the winners from the first round.
Off the Block is in its 10th season of providing college men’s volleyball bracketology.
PROJECTED NCAA TOURNAMENT FIELD
FIRST-FOUR TEAMS OUT
UCLA (15-6)
Loyola (15-5)
George Mason (15-6)
McKendree (11-6)
Quick breakdown: Hawai’i suffered a huge upset loss in the MPSF Tournament semifinals but is a lock for the No. 1 seed. A conference championship is not part of the criteria used to determine NCAA Tournament seeding and the loss counts the same as an regular season loss in the criteria. Pepperdine put itself in the best position possible to get an at-large bid to the NCAA Tournament if it loses to BYU in the MPSF Tournament finals on Saturday. The Waves defeated the Bruins and now have an advantage in the selection criteria category of head-to-head. However, UCLA still fares better than Pepperdine in multiple criteria categories, including record versus teams under NCAA Tournament consideration. Ultimately if everything goes chalk on Championship Saturday, the selection committee will have to decide what is more valuable — head-to-head record or record versus teams under NCAA Tournament consideration.