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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 during Selection Sunday on April 24.
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 11th season of providing college men’s volleyball bracketology.
PROJECTED NCAA TOURNAMENT FIELD
FIRST-FOUR TEAMS OUT
UC Santa Barbara (14-4)
Pepperdine (10-6)
Loyola (12-6)
Grand Canyon (11-8)
Quick breakdown: Do not panic if your favorite team is seeded low or is not in the tournament field. There is still a month of the regular season and the conference tournament – plenty of time for these projections to change. This is Off the Block’s 11th season of conducting the men’s volleyball bracketology, and it is the most crowded field for a possible at-large bid since 2012. There are five upcoming two-match series in the final month of the season that will have the greatest influence on the bracketology projections – UC Santa Barbara versus Long Beach State (March 25-26), UCLA versus USC (March 31 and April 2), Long Beach State versus Hawai’i (April 1-2), UCLA versus Pepperdine (April 7 and April 9) and UC Santa Barbara versus Hawai’i (April 8-9). Long Beach State and USC enter this stretch with the best bracketology resumes. Pepperdine is on the opposite end land ikely needs to run the table or have one loss the rest of the season to remain in contention. This latest projection also does not take into account geography considerations if the play-in match is played at an on-campus location instead of the site of the NCAA Tournament finals. If the play-in match takes place at an on-campus site, the NCAA could alter the bracket by having two teams not among the top two seeds and close in geographic proximity play each other.