OMAHA, NE ― Maybe it was too early to panic about the SEC.
Long the nation’s premier baseball conference, the SEC got a record 13 bids to the NCAA tournament. But just four of those 13 teams advanced to super regionals and two to Omaha, leading to conversations about whether the league was overrated.
But those two teams − Arkansas and LSU − are two of the last four teams remaining in the 2025 Men’s College World Series after the Razorbacks’ win over UCLA to advance to the semifinals. One of the two teams is guaranteed to advance to the national championship series, with Arkansas needing to beat LSU twice to do so.
Whether LSU or Arkansas advances, it will make 16 times in the last 17 seasons that the SEC has had a team in the national championship series, with the 2016 matchup between Coastal Carolina and Arizona being the only season without one. Five of those series have seen two SEC teams facing each other, plus two more that featured now-SEC members Oklahoma and Texas when they were in the Big 12.
This time, the matchup of SEC heavyweights will take place in the semifinals rather than the finals; the winner will take on Louisville or Coastal Carolina.
Each of the last five completed seasons has seen a different national champion from the SEC: Vanderbilt in 2019, Mississippi State in 2021, Ole Miss in 2022, LSU in 2023 and Tennessee in 2024. Arkansas, which is seeking its first national title in baseball, could make it a sixth.
But it’ll have to go through the Tigers to get there. LSU won both the series between the two teams earlier this season and the opening game between the two of them on June 14.
‘We played them four times,’ Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn said. ‘We lost in extra innings. They whipped us. We beat them. And then what happened the other night. I remember them all. The first game finished about 1:15 in the morning. And then we got beat later that day. Then we won on a Sunday … They’re really good. They don’t have any weaknesses. They’ve got big-time arms. Their top six, seven arms, all are big time at this level. They’ve got power, got some speed. You just have to pitch well against them and you’ve got to score. If we don’t score, we’ll be in trouble.’
The Razorbacks have their pitching set up relatively well. Top two starters Gage Wood and Zach Root are unlikely to be available, as are top relievers Gabe Gaeckle and Aiden Jimenez. But Arkansas has several other options, including Landon Beidelschies, Cole Gibler, Ben Bybee, Dylan Carter, Tate McGuire, Colin Fisher and Parker Coil. If the Razorbacks can win the first semifinal to advance to Thursday, Gaeckle might be able to return after throwing six innings and 90 pitches in relief in the first game. But LSU would likely counter with ace Kade Anderson, who shut down Arkansas for seven innings of one-run ball the same day.
If one of Arkansas or LSU can clinch the national championship, all the hemming and hawing about the league from earlier in the postseason will prove moot. And even if one of them can’t, the SEC has proven that even in a down season, you can pencil the league into Omaha until the very end.
Aria Gerson covers Vanderbilt athletics for The Tennessean. Contact her at agerson@gannett.com or on X @aria_gerson.