NCAA poor postseason travel agent

Published 7:40 am Wednesday, May 17, 2017

So, congratulations, McNeese Cowgirls.

You’re going to the NCAA tournament, softball’s Big Dance, for a second consecutive year.

That’s kind of what you work toward all season, right? It makes the toil of the regular season and the tension of the Southland Conference Tournament (and its automatic bid) worth all the headache, right?

Good job.

So your reward is … 

Uh …

Ever been to Baton Rouge?

Can’t miss it. Just down Interstate 10 a piece. About two hours as the crow flies, but allow for extra tangled traffic just before you get to the Mississippi River bridge.

Nice ballpark and …

Wait a minute.

For the moment, never mind the reward.

This is supposed to be the postseason, right?

This is supposed to be special.

Mostly, this is supposed to be different.

So the Cowgirls get to go to LSU.

Big whoop-de-do.

Of course, there will be two other teams there for the double-elimination festivities.

So when the Cowgirls arrive Friday for their opening game, they will face off against — drum roll — Louisiana-Lafayette.

Huh? Is this the vaunted postseason or a midweek in March?

Bottom line: don’t expect the tournament selection committee to start thinking outside the box.

The formula is simple. Grab two in-state teams and send them to Baton Rouge (or, some years, Lafayette), then mix in one team from four airline connections away.

There’s no softball regional site east of the Mississippi that’s north of Kentucky, so a lot of those Midwest and Northeast teams that got automatic bids have to be sent somewhere.

They sprinkle them throughout the Southeast and West Coast.

This year the wild card for Baton Rouge is Fairfield, which, I believe, is a college in Connecticut.

Doesn’t matter. After LSU beats Fairfield, the loser of the ULL-McNeese game will then eliminate the — let me look this up — the Stags, it is.

Then our fair state will have the Baton Rouge regional all to itself.

They won’t need any introductions. And Fairfield will be gone before it can exchange hugs and handshakes.

Good rivalries. McNeese always enjoys playing the Cajuns and the ULL and LSU softball programs hate each other so much they really don’t like to even play each other without extra security.

But that kind of foolishness is for the regular season.

Instead, the familiar postseason pattern holds.

Send schools somewhere familiar where they could probably hitchhike to make first pitch.

It’s not just Louisiana.

Consider the regional that Texas A&M is hosting in College Station. Every school in it begins with Texas — Texas, Texas A&M, Texas State and Texas Southern.

If they all pulled a Louisiana-Lafayette and disowned their modifiers, you’d have a bunch of really confused scoreboards.

Same thing at Florida, which also has Florida A&M and Florida International.

Granted, there’s a bright side. Being so close, it does allow McNeese fans easy access to a postseason road trip.

Anybody of a mind to cheer on the Cowgirls doesn’t really have an excuse not to go.

Same for UL-Lafayette.

So there’s that.

McNeese coach James Landreneaux wasn’t complaining. He was happy to be so close to home. He kind of thought his Cowgirls might go to College Station, but McNeese doesn’t have Texas in its name.

Good for him.

But the experience for players who’ve earned the postseason should be, well … something different, preferably somewhere different.

McNeese played at Tiger Park in February in something called the LSU Tiger Classic — which had a much more diverse field than this weekend’s NCAA regional.

Sure, this week there will be a different “feel” to Tiger Park than usual. They’ll probably gussy it up with red, white and blue bunting.

Certainly there’s more at stake.

But it would have a lot more of a postseason feel if there were some teams you had to do an honest scouting report on.

Stick around.

No doubt in just two short weeks the NCAA baseball tournament will be doing much the same thing with its men’s bracket.

l

Scooter Hobbs covers LSU

athletics. Email him at

shobbs@americanpress.com