2012 C-USA Baseball Tournament Bracket: Rice, UCF Should Be Top Seeds

Rice will look to win a second consecutive Conference USA Baseball title this week, but they're likely going to get quite the fight from current conference leader UCF.

The tournament isn't scheduled to begin until Wednesday, May 23, but we can begin to paint a pretty clear picture of what the tournament will look like. Here's how the tournament works, directly from C-USA's website:

The 2012 Conference USA Championship will feature the top eight teams in regular-season league play. Those six will be split into two four-team pools (or pods), with the winner of each pod playing in a single championship game. Teams will be assigned pods based on seed, which will be determined by the order of finish in regular-season conference play. Each team will be guaranteed to play three games. Teams in each pod will play the other three teams in its pod. The team with the best composite record in each pod would advance to the championship game. Two-way ties in a pod would be broken by head-to- head play. In case of a three-way tie, the highest seed would advance.

Currently, the seedings would look like this:

1. UCF
2. Rice
3. Tulane
4. Southern Miss
5. Memphis
6. East Carolina
7. UAB
8. Houston