Alabama Baseball’s RPI and What it Means for Postseason Seeding

Collegiate sports can sometimes feel like a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it affair. As quickly as the calendar turned to February and college baseball ramped back up for another regular season, that season is now nearing the halfway point of the month of April.

In less than two months (approximately one and a half), conference tournaments around the nation will paint a clearer picture as to the NCAA Tournament. Where the No. 12 Alabama baseball team is concerned, one of the team’s postseason goals is to serve as a host for regionals.

Comfortably inside the D1Baseball Top 25, the Crimson Tide has carved out a 27-6 record and a 7-5 start to SEC play. If host selection was based unilaterally on the number next to a team’s name, Sewell-Thomas Stadium would be a regional site were the campaign to end Tuesday.

A multitude of factors are ultimately considered by the selection committee, however, when choosing the 16 hosts each summer. Strength of schedule is one of the headliners. Another all-important cog in the machine? RPI.

An SEC team’s RPI will get a push solely from how good the conference is. Wins and losses are still preeminent, but a Southeastern Conference team with 13 league wins will reap more RPI benefits than a Big Ten team with the same number of conference victories if the teams’ overall marks are equal.

Alabama, for example, made the 2021 NCAA Tournament with a 12-17 league record. Following this past weekend’s series loss at Auburn, the 2025 Crimson Tide’s RPI sits at ninth (down from seventh in the previous rankings).

The implications therein are that Rob Vaughn’s team would most likely be given the opportunity to host if the selection show was momentarily imminent, regardless of its D1Baseball ranking. Vaughn guided Maryland to a host spot in 2022; the Terrapins earned the No. 15 national seed.

The Crimson Tide last hosted in 2023 as the No. 16 seed. That team’s RPI was higher than the national seed it got, eliciting controversy and discussion among the fanbase. Strength of schedule, mentioned above, is not an item any of the 16 SEC teams is going to be worried about.

More than a full month remains in the regular season. The landscape of college baseball doesn’t need that long to change. Dallas Baptist, which defeated Alabama in the 2024 Frisco Classic finale, was the No. 7 team in the country at the start of last April and did not end up hosting.

Plenty more is going to happen between Tuesday (when Alabama plays No. 23 Southern Miss) and the culmination of the selection process. For the Crimson Tide to remain in this vital postseason conversation, it needs to continue winning, improving and staking its claim as one of the SEC’s many contending teams.