Well, that was exciting.
As a general rule, regionals are not quite formalities, but they aren’t edge of your seat viewing, either, particularly for a team like LSU. While there might be a battle over the second spot, the top seed is supposed to glide through with minimal difficulty.
“Supposed to” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Instead, LSU found itself in dogfights on consecutive days simply to make it to nationals. The second day of the regional was intense that four of the top eight scores in the nation all occurred in Salt Lake City.