Justin’s World of Softball Ranks UL Softball in Preseason Top 10

The Louisiana Ragin' Cajuns are ranked in the top ten of a preseason poll of a major college softball website.

Justin's World of Softball ranks Louisiana at number nine in its 2021 preseason top 25 poll, which was released on Monday.

That's not surprising considering how good the Cajuns were last year, and how good they've been over the years.

Last season, Louisiana was 18-6, ranked in everyone's top ten, and number one in the RPI poll when the season was shut down in mid-March due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

We'll never know how things would have played out, but it's almost certain UL would have hosted a regional for the first time since 2016, and very likely would have hosted a Super Regional for the first time since 2014.

Had this been the case, Louisiana would have headed to the NCAA Softball Tournament for the 22nd-consecutive year, while making an NCAA Regional appearance for the 30th time in the last 31 years.

The only year since 1990 in which UL failed to appear in a regional was 1998.

Louisiana is one of only 9 programs to appear in an NCAA Regional every year since 2000, joining Alabama, Arizona, Florida St., Michigan, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, UCLA, and Washington.

UCLA is ranked as the top team in the preseason poll, followed by Washington, Oklahoma, Arizona, and LSU at 2-5, respectively.

At 6-10,Texas, Florida (tie for 7th), Alabama (tie for 7th), Louisiana, and Oregon round out the top ten.

At 11-15, it's Oklahoma St., Florida St., Georgia, Virginia Tech, and Michigan & Mississippi St. (tied for 15th), followed by Arizona St., Arkansas, UCF, and Kentucky in spots 17-20.

Finally, Baylor (tie for 21st) & Missouri (tie for 21st), South Carolina, Duke, and Minnesota (tie for 25th) and North Texas (tie for 25th) check-in at 21-25, respectively, to round out the preseason top 25.

Louisiana is ranked at number seven in the D1Softball preseason poll, and at number nine in both the USA Today/NFCA poll and the ESPN.com/USA Softball poll, which were all released prior.