South Florida picked first and choose to go to Florida and then Illinois through a little curve and decided to go to Oklahoma. A few picks later Arkansas and Michigan also choose the Oklahoma Regional which meant it was filled up after just nine picks. The allure of an Oklahoma team that will have to replace its coach and top two players was just too much for teams to pass on.
Oklahoma State is expected to return everyone from a top 15 team but that didn’t stop Kentucky, Tulsa, and Columbia from jumping on board rather quickly.
I had Stanford pegged to play in an outdoors site but they opted to go back to Northwestern and play indoors. Stanford of course played in the Northwestern regional during the opening rounds of the NCAA Tournament though both of those matches were played outdoors.
I think any of the four teams in the Texas A&M, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma State regionals can win and the only one in the Texas Tech regional that is probably too big of a long shot is Iowa.
I’d say there is a 0% chance of UCLA, TCU, Ohio State, or Wake Forest losing with Georgia, Cal, Florida, USC, and Texas all heavily favored (>95%) as well. North Carolina should be a pretty heavy favorite with the percentage probably above 90% assuming Simon Soendergaard (14.79 UTR) plays in the top three.
Texas A&M and Baylor have a lot of firepower to replace but A&M had a good amount of bench strength this year. Probably won’t know who to pick on this one until we see the completed rosters in January and some of the newcomers results do in the fall. SMU and Ole Miss will be a good match with Ole Miss head coach Toby Hansson being a 2000 SMU graduate. Texas A&M will have the home court advantage but this regional will be up for grabs.
I can’t really handicap the Oklahoma regional until I see who OU brings in as coach and see what the roster looks like in the fall/spring. Illinois should be tough IF Aleks Vukic returns and IF at least two of the three newcomers (Zeke Clark, Gui Gomes, Kristopher Ortega) can be strong contributors. If those ifs don’t happen then it could be a tough weekend. Arkansas brings back four of its six singles starters with Munoz and Micolani departing (#3/#4 singles) but if they can add another starter in the fall or if a few of the guys that didn’t play as much this year can step up next year they’ll be a force. Michigan brings back everyone from a team that came extremely close to taking out Wake Forest in the second round of the NCAAs so they’ve got to taken as real threat to run the table as well.
Five more teams took a pass with the most surprising being NC State. When the Pack’s turn came up the Wake Forest Regional was still empty plus they could have gone to play Georgia or Florida with a decent chance to win a consolation match. They must have decided there would be better options available against other teams not participating in the Kick-Off Weekend – i.e South Carolina, Tennessee, William & Mary, College of Charleston, North Florida etc.
Dartmouth will probably end up playing the ECAC Tournament the weekend of the National Team Indoors against Harvard, Princeton, Cornell, St. John’s, Brown, etc which will be just as good a test.
Mmmbop, ba duba dop
No relation – Hansson is a pretty common last name in Sweden.
Bobby any relation between Ole Miss' Toby Hansson and player Gustav Hansson? Seems like too much of a coincidence they're on the same team.