Just a gentle warning here, but it’s best to tread lightly when trying to project the final Southeastern Conference baseball standings, even with the one final weekend of the regular season to play.

It was already tough enough with maybe the toughest single conference in any NCAA sport.

How rough?

LSU, the consensus No. 1 team in the country, is relegated to third place in its own conference.

No shame there. Not in this league.

Technically, in the mathematical sense, LSU (17-10 SEC) could catch first-place Texas (20-7) in the standings.

But the Longhorns, who won the regular-season series against LSU, would own the tiebreaker, at least for seeding in next week’s SEC Tournament in Hoover, Alabama.

But, in the SEC, baseball isn’t really about winning conference championships, certainly not tournament titles.

It’s all about jockeying for position to make a run at being the next SEC team to win what would be the league’s sixth consecutive national championship, maybe even with a sixth different team.

So, LSU is playing to earn one of the top eight national seeds, which earns a team the right to play at home in the regionals and, if it wins, the super regionals.

Since the super regional era began in 1999, the Tigers have never made it to Omaha without having Alex Box Stadium as the final launch pad.

So, yes, it’s important to LSU.

Maybe the Tigers have already earned one those eight spots regardless of what happens the next two weeks.

As of Tuesday, the D1Baseball. com website projected the Tigers as the No. 2 overall national seed, one of six from the SEC in the coveted top eight.

And it does appear to be there for the taking. LSU finishes the regular season at South Carolina, 5-22 in the league.

You can’t get a much better deal than that.

Careful, though.

This is a league that, just last weekend, Missouri, the antithesis to all this excellence, was winless at 0-24 and in the conversation as the worst SEC team of all time.

Those hapless Tigers were headed to Texas A&M, which started the season No. 1 before free-falling out of the rankings, only in recent weeks to seemingly become the Aggies everybody thought they were, including a series win over LSU. So go figure. Mizzou is 3-24 after sweeping three from previously resurgent A&M.

Or take Florida, which started conference play 1-11, but was last seen barging into Austin to take two of three from mighty Texas.

I could go on, but you get the picture — even the (relative) dregs at the bottom have had their sunny days.

So LSU probably needs to at least pay attention in South Carolina and take of its business before the conference tournament.

For what it means, the SEC Tournament gets a disproportionate amount of fan interest, which is fine. That’s what the games are for after all — entertainment. But the conference tournament has always been played pretty much for grins and giggles and often into the wee hours of the next morning.

I mean, all the teams stay in the same Hoover high-rise hotel without any fear of bloodshed.

The results seldom have much effect on the real tournament, the NCAA road to Omaha for the College World Series.

At best, the Hoover pit stop can help a team more than it might hurt one.

That’s even more the case this year with the change in format. It’s an offshoot from the greed of expansion for football, but if you’re going to shoehorn 16 baseball teams into a six-day tournament in one ballyard with the threat of rain ever present, you have to cut some corners.

If you haven’t heard, it will be single elimination from start to finish. The bottom eight play the first day. Seeds 5-8 get a free pass to Wednesday’s second round. The top four don’t play until the quarterfinals on Thursday and Friday.

If the standings’ seeding holds — and it won’t — LSU would be the No. 3 seed.

If I’m reading this right, that would mean by the time the Tigers — or whoever the No. 3 seed is — throw their first tournament pitch, 11 teams will already be eliminated.

That’s not ideal for fans, who always swarm in, as you might hesitate before investing the time and mileage on what could be a one-and-done, Hoover toe-tap.

That’s not really the way baseball is meant to be played.

But, still, the worst that can happen to any one team is to get one more loss. One loss is not likely to have much, if any, effect on making or not making the big tournament, let alone seeding for same.

If it meant much, they wouldn’t take those short cuts.

But they’re the SEC, they’re going to get a dozen, maybe 13 or 14, teams in the NCAA Tournament regardless, and can get away with doing whatever they want.
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Scooter Hobbs covers LSU athletics. Email him at scooter.hobbs@americanpress.com