NCAA Division 2 Baseball Rankings – 4/13/09

The College Baseball News and Ping!Baseball D2 college baseball rankings have been released for the week.

• The College Baseball News Division 2 college baseball poll saw a big shakeup at the top of the rankings as last week’s #1 team (Florida Southern) and #2 team (Grand Valley State) both dropped 3 spots to #4 & #5 respectively.  That allowed Southern Arkansas to jump to their #1 spot.  Mesa State also moved up a spot to #2 and Emporia State moves up to #3 from #5.  Overall, there wasn’t as much movement as we’ve seen in some weeks as only 1 team that was in last week’s top 20 fell out of the top 20 this week (Cameron from #12 to #21) as USC Aiken jumped from #24 to #14.  The Northern Sun’s Wayne State (NE) continues to make incremental progress up the poll as they moved from #27 to #23 this week.  College Baseball News Ranking
• Ping!Baseball didn’t have as big a shakeup at the top since they have had Southern Arkansas as their #1 team for 7 straight weeks.  Florida Southern and Grand Valley State stayed at #2 & #3 in their Top 30.  In fact, they made no changes at all to their top 10 from last week.  Erskine took the biggest fall moving from #11 to #21 with a lousy week.  Ping continues to rank the Northern Sun’s St. Cloud State in their poll although they dropped from #26 to #30.  Why they have the Huskies in the poll ahead of teams like Wayne State and Minnesota State is a mystery to me.  Ping!Baseball Ranking

NCBWA Central Region D2 Baseball Poll – 4/13/09

The National College Baseball Writers Association has released their Regional Poll for the week ending April 12th.  At the end of the regular season these are the teams that will be competing for 6 spots in the NCAA Regional Tournament.  Both the Northern Sun Intercollegiate Conference Tournament Champion and the Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference Tournament Champion will earn automatic bids with the remaining 4 spots nominated as at-large bids.

I talked about the RMAC in a posting yesterday (RMAC Update). 

It would be really great if the Northern Sun Conference could end up with 4 of the 6 spots but the 3 top teams in the RMAC are on hot streaks right now.  That 3rd team in the RMAC (New Mexico Highlands) has won 10 straight and jumped up 2 spots to take over the #5 position in this poll.  SMSU fell 3 spots this week as any team that loses a game to Minnesota Crookston is going to be penalized.  With Wayne State and Minnesota State looking the best in the Northern Sun so far, it may come down to a dog fight for the last at-large bid (assuming the Conference Tourney’s don’t have upsets which allow automatic bids to go to lower ranked teams).

Keep in mind that the official NCAA Regional polls are more important to gauge which teams will get at-large bids.  It’s likely that those NCAA polls will be released this week or next for the first time.  As always, Northern Sun Baseball will post it as soon as they are published.

NCBWA Regional Polls