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As Plainsman Park gets set to host an NCAA Regional for a second-consecutive season, the No. 13 Auburn Tigers know now who they'll host this weekend and where they're seeded
Gift this article Share this article paywall-free. Email Copy Link Copied to clipboard ADAM COLE in this tournament. Like their ranking, The Tigers were slated as the No. 13 overall seed in this year's NCAA Tournament.
It's the second-highest seeding Auburn has had in the tournament since it moved to 64 teams in 1999. It’ll be Southern Miss, Samford and Penn coming to the Plains, the second, third and fourth seed in this year’s Auburn Regional, respectively. Play in the Auburn Regional will begin June 2, with Southern Miss and Samford playing 1 p.m. CST and the Tigers playing Penn at 6 p.m. Both games will be televised for streaming on ESPN+. While tickets for the entire weekend were initially available for purchase through Auburn's website, the program announced Monday that its all-session tickets had sold out and fans were encouraged to check StubHub for a limited inventory of resale tickets. People are also reading… Auburn will match up with the Quakers to begin regional play. It'll be the second time the programs have ever faced off, last playing in the postseason in 1995. Between its three potential opponents, Auburn has seen the trio a combined 110 times in program history. The bulk of those matchups have come against Samford, which Auburn has played 102 times, including a 13-3 run-rule win against the Bulldogs earlier this season. The Tigers and Southern Miss last played in 2006, with the Golden Eagles winning 3-1. The Tigers found out Sunday evening that, for the first in the program’s history, the road to Omaha and the Men's College World Series would run through Plainsman Park in back-to-back seasons. It'll mark Auburn's second-straight season as a regional host, which has never happened in its history. It previously hosted regionals in 1978, 1999, 2003, 2010 and 2022. Since the tournament doubled its national seeding from eight to 16 teams in 2018, Auburn has been a national seed on two occasions. Both of those have been under coach Butch Thompson. The entirety of Thompson’s Auburn tenure has existed with the NCAA Tournament in its most expansive format, including more teams and national seeds than ever before. But as he becomes the only Auburn coach to lead the program to back-to-back seasons as regional hosts, the program continues what’s been a consistent ascension in terms of on-field progress under his watch. Now in his eighth season at the helm, Thompson’s Auburn teams have qualified for the NCAA Tournament five times in seven opportunities, including this season. With the announcement of Auburn hosting a regional this week, Thompson officially moves into second all-time among Auburn coaches with NCAA Tournament appearances, at five. He was previously tied with Paul Nix , whose teams made four appearances. No coach has led Auburn to more NCAA Tournament appearances than Hal Baird , who did so nine times. While Thompson now has the second-most NCAA Tournament appearances of any Auburn coach, he comes into that fifth appearance with one his more successful regular seasons on the Plains. The Tigers’ 33 regular-season wins are tied for the third-most of a team led by Thompson, and their outright third-place finish in the SEC West is the highest one of his Auburn clubs has ever reached in the division standings. Auburn reached third place in the West, and fifth place overall in this year’s conference standings, with a season that saw a complete turnaround at the midway point of SEC play. After being six games above .500 and 5-10 in conference play, Auburn rattled off its first series win since late March when it beat Mississippi State 12-11 on April 23 in walk-off fashion. The Tigers went on to win their final four series of the season, beating then-No. 2 South Carolina on the road, icing a series win against then-No. 1 LSU with a run-rule victory in the series finale, and then sweeping at Ole Miss and hosting Missouri. The regular season wrapped with Auburn going 12-4 in its final 16 games, and it subsequently secured its first win at the SEC Tournament in four years to follow. “We finished as strong as we could have for the first half,” Thompson said May 22. “Basically, I thought the team — even the benchmark and the goal that we set for them, they shattered that, so kudos to the team.” Half of this year's regional sites are made up of SEC programs, as Baton Rouge , Columbia , Fayetteville , Gainesville , Lexington , Nashville and Tuscaloosa were also named in the field of national seeds. Four of those teams — No. 2 seed Florida, No. 3 seed Arkansas, No. 5 seed LSU and No. 6 seed Vanderbilt — are in the top half of the national seeding. Kentucky , South Carolina and Alabama join Auburn in the bottom half.
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