2017 ACC baseball tournament: How to watch, schedule, bracket, tourney format, and more

The ACC announced the schedule for the 2017 baseball conference tournament on Sunday afternoon. The event will get underway on Tuesday morning in Louisville with pool play. The tournament expanded to 12 teams this year, making pool play a bit more unwieldy.

Four pools of three teams apiece go round robin, with the winners of each pool advancing to the semifinals on Saturday. The two teams that prevail on Saturday play for the title on Sunday. So each team is guaranteed at least two games and could play as many as four.

NC State is the No. 7 seed and is in a pool with No. 2 UNC and No. 11 Boston College. The Pack opens against Boston College at 3 p.m. ET on Tuesday. Here is the full schedule:

Via TheACC.com

(If it isn’t clear, those numbers represent game times.)

Here’s the bracket.

There are gonna be a whole lot of 1-1 tiebreakers at work this year, I’d imagine. I think the first tiebreaker is how the tied teams fared against each other in the regular season, with tiebreakers growing more convoluted from there. I don’t love this format but it saves pitching so I don’t know what a good alternative would be, or even if there is one.

NC State dropped its regular season series to both UNC and BC, so I think the Wolfpack has to go 2-0 in order to advance. In any event, if they can’t beat Boston College on Tuesday they don’t deserve to advance anyway. The winner of this pool plays the winner of the Wake Forest/Miami/Georgia Tech pool in the semifinals.

As usual, every game of the tournament will be televised. The games played Tuesday through Saturday will air on your area’s Fox Sports network (assuming you’re in the ACC region, that is), and the title game will air on ESPN2.