General info....
Of the 64 teams that make up the bracket, 32 will qualify automatically. All but four of those teams will earn those AQ bids by winning conference tournaments. Four conferences (Big West, Mountain West, Pac-12 and West Coast) will award their AQ spots to the regular-season champion.
Regionals | May 17 - 19, 2019
Regionals for the NCAA Division I Softball Championship will be held May 17 - 19, 2019 on 16 campus sites. At each campus site, a four-team, double-elimination tournament will be conducted and the 16 winning teams advanced to the Super Regionals.
Super Regionals | May 23 - 26, 2019
Super Regionals for the NCAA Division I Softball Championship will be held May 23 - 26, 2019 on eight campus sites. At each site, two teams play in a best-of-three tournament format. The winners from each site advance to the NCAA Women’s College World Series.
https://www.ncaa.com/championships/softball/d1/road-to-the-championship
More specifically....
The NCAA championship manual says:
"The RPI [Rating Percentage Index] is intended to be used as one of many valuable resources provided to the committee in the selection, seeding and bracketing process. It never should be considered anything but an additional evaluation tool. No computer program that is based on pure numbers can take into account subjective concepts (e.g., how well a team is playing down the stretch, what the loss or return of a top player means to a team or how emotional a specific conference game may be)."
Consider however from a few years ago....
"history suggests calling the RPI one of many resources necessary for selection is like calling water one of many resources needed for swimming.
Let's start with the 16 national seeds. Since 2007, which is when available RPI data begin, teams ranked in the top 16 of the final pre-selection RPI accounted for 105 of 112 national seeds. Only once in that span did a team ranked No. 20 or lower in the RPI earn a national seed (Long Beach State in 2008). That could be a hurdle for the Big Ten this season, as co-champs Michigan (18) and Nebraska (19), as well as Minnesota (17), are all currently on the outside looking in.
There is some mobility within the seeds, but not as much as the caveat in the handbook might lead you to believe. A season ago, Arizona State was No. 11 in the pre-selection RPI but the No. 5 seed in the bracket. That is not the norm. Only four other times since 2007 has a team ranked No. 10 or lower ended up with one of the coveted top eight seeds (which come with the opportunity to host not just a regional but any potential super regional). That may be cause for alarm at Tennessee, which finished second in the SEC but is No. 13 in the most recent RPI.
It isn't just the seeds that bear a striking resemblance to the RPI. When Iowa was left out a season ago while ranked No. 34 in the RPI, it became the only eligible team (i.e., a winning record and not reclassifying to Division I) in the past seven years that didn't receive an at-large bid after entering the selection process in the top 40. That's encouraging news for teams like Lipscomb, Hofstra, UAB, Northwestern and Wisconsin at the moment."
"During team selection the top sixteen teams are given "national seeds", which are used for organizing the brackets. The first tier, called "regionals", consists of 16 locations that include four teams competing in a double elimination bracket. The regional containing overall #1 seed will be matched up with the regional containing the overall #16 seed, the #2 seed will be matched up with the #15 seed, and so on. The winner of each regional moves on to the second tier, the "super regionals".
The super regionals are played at eight locations throughout the country and consist of the 16 surviving teams, with the higher seeded team usually hosting. Two teams are matched up at each location and they play a best-of-three series to determine who moves on to the Women's College World Series."
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