Elimination Day
After all the excitement and action that has been taking place in the world of college softball, it feels a bit weird for there to only have been four games on TV yesterday. That was the case though, and the aftermath of Thursday leads us into Friday where only two games will be played, but those two games will also send two teams home after their long battle to get to this point.
Three seed Texas Tech came out guns blazing and run ruled five seed Mississippi State 8 to 0 in five innings. Meanwhile, two seed Tennessee took down 1 seed Texas 6 to 3. That one actually doesn't surprise me as much as you might think. Despite being the defending champion, I felt like Texas was struggling in some of the earlier rounds. Their 1 seed might have been a bit overstated and seeing them fall in the first round of the Women's College World Series feels kind of right to me. Plus Tennessee is just a really good team.
One seed Alabama had a massive late game win over two seed UCLA 6 to 3 as well. The Bruins had a nice lead through most of the game only to give up a home run to make it a tie at three a piece right around the midpoint of the game. Then Alabama dinged another one out of the park and sealed the deal pushing UCLA back down to the loser bracket.
Finally, one seed Nebraska took down two seed Arkansas 5 to 3. There is a lot of hype around Arkansas since this is their first time ever being in the tournament, but I am still happy to see Nebraska getting the win. They are my hopeful to win the whole thing.
As I have pointed out countless times before, this is a double elimination portion of the tournament, so just because these teams have lost once doesn't mean they are out of the running for the championship.
Again, that all leads us to two elimination games today when Texas faces Mississippi State and Arkansas faces UCLA. If I had to make prediction on these games, since predictions seem to be all the rage these days, I am going to go with Texas beating Mississippi State and UCLA beating Arkansas.
Meanwhile, over in division II, we also had four games yesterday and two non-elimination games today.
One seed Saint Leo beat St. Thomas Aquinas 4 to 2, Cal State San Marcos beat West Texas A & M 5 to 4, Mo Southern State beat Glenville State 5 to 3, and McKendree took down North Georgia 1 to 0.
That leads us to the upper bracket games of Saint Leo versus Cal St. San Marcos today and Mo Southern State vs. McKendree today. The winners of those games will have a bit of a wait as they watch the lower teams battle it out to see who they face in the finals.
It's kind of flipped versus how they do it in Division I.
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