Conference USA Baseball Tournament 2022 Preview, schedule

The Conference USA Baseball Tournament is headed to Hattiesburg, Mississippi. Here’s how to watch and what to be looking for this week.

The final weekend of regular season play saw teams jockeying for position, but now the Conference USA Baseball Tournament field is finally set. The top eight squads will square off with hopes of an automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament and their chance to play for a trip to the College World Series.

All games will be streamed on ESPN+ with the exception of the tournament championship, available on CBS Sports Network. The tournament runs from Wednesday, May 25 to Sunday, May 29. The full schedule and updated bracket are available on the Conference USA Baseball Tournament website.

Assessing the field

The favorite | Southern Miss enters the tournament as the No. 1 seed with a three-game lead on the next closest member of the field. The Golden Eagles are the conference’s only nationally ranked team and possess enough firepower on both sides of the ball to separate themselves from the next bunch behind them.

The contenders | Old Dominion, Florida Atlantic and UTSA finished the regular season with identical conference records (19-11) just one game back of Louisiana Tech (20-10). If any of those clubs and win their first two games, they’ll be in the driver’s seat to win the tournament. The field is rather deep this year behind Southern Miss and it shouldn’t surprise anyone if one of these “next four” wins it all.

The darkhorse | Charlotte dropped their final conference series against Louisiana Tech two games to one, but prior to that the 49ers had won four straight series with two sweeps. Winners of 16 of their last 20 games, this is a team playing way above what their record says they are entering the tournament.

The wild card | UTSA has somewhat quietly assembled a remarkable season, posting at least one win over every team in the tournament field. They can score runs in bunches. If they can avoid taxing their pitching staff, a run through the winner’s bracket is certainly within reach for this squad.