College baseball bracketology: NC State moves into the field of 64

NC State's nine-game winning streak has helped it move into the RPI top-40 and put it back on the radar for the NCAA tournament, and a few weeks back, this would have felt impossible. The latest NCAA tournament projections from Perfect Game and D1Baseball.com have the Pack in the field as a three-seed***.

(***If you aren't familiar with the format: the NCAA tournament begins initially with 16 regionals of four teams apiece. In each regional, the teams are seeded one through four, with the host team getting the one seed.)

Perfect Game has State playing in a regional with host Iowa, plus Arizona State and Central Michigan. D1Baseball.com places the Pack in Dallas Baptist's region along with Houston and South Alabama. D1Baseball also does not list NCSU among its last five teams in, which suggests that State's in better shape than we thought.

If that's the case, there's not as much pressure on the Wolfpack to do damage in the ACC tournament, assuming the guys can at least pick up one victory over Louisville in the final series of the regular season. At this point, maybe one win in this last series is all that's needed. I'd think that a series win over the Cards would make NC State a lock regardless of what happens in the ACC tournament.