FAYETTEVILLE – Arkansas’ baseball team will see a lot of familiar faces when it rolls into Omaha, Neb., for the College World Series this weekend.
The Razorbacks (44-19) punched their ticket on Monday with a 14-4 victory over South Carolina in Game 3 of the Fayetteville Super Regional, giving head coach Dave Van Horn his fifth trip to Omaha as head coach of the Hogs. Monday’s game marked the fourth meeting of the year between the Razorbacks and Gamecocks.
Now Van Horn’s club is paired in a bracket with Florida, Texas and Texas Tech, three teams it has already seen plenty of this season. The Razorbacks went 2-2 against the Gators, 2-0 versus the Longhorns and 1-0 against the Red Raiders earlier this spring.
“There won’t be any surprises,” Van Horn said. “We played Texas a couple of times, watched them on TV a couple of times. Obviously we’ve seen Florida play and played Florida (four) times.
“Who’s the other team in our bracket? Texas Tech, they’re pretty good, too. They’re awfully good. They’re big and strong, they’re an SEC-looking team and so is Texas. Our bracket is about as tough as it gets.”
Florida (47-19), the defending national champion, returns to the big stage after taking a walk-off victory over Auburn in the Gainesville Super Regional Monday night. The Gators entered postseason play as the nation’s number one overall seed.
Arkansas went 1-2 at Florida in the regular season (March 23-25) but evened the record with an 8-2 victory over Kevin O’Sullivan’s squad in the SEC Tournament.
The Razorbacks swept a two-game series over the Longhorns with wins of 13-4 and 7-5 earlier in March. Texas (42-21) went on to win the Big 12 and gained home-field advantage throughout the postseason.
The Longhorns lost to Tennessee Tech in Game 1 of the Austin Regional last Saturday but advanced with wins of 4-2 and 5-2 in back-to-back days.
The Hogs and Horns meet at 1 p.m. central on Sunday in a game to be televised by ESPN. Texas Tech (44-18) visited Fayetteville in late April and took a 5-1 loss before seeing the series’ second game canceled due to weather.
The Red Raiders, who knocked off Louisville in its regional before defeating Duke in the Lubbock Super Regional, will face Florida at 6 p.m. on Sunday.
The opposite side of the bracket includes North Carolina, Oregon State, Washington and Mississippi State.
MSU pulled off a very surprising sweep over the Razorbacks in the weekend prior to Texas Tech’s midweek trip to Fayetteville. The Bulldogs (37-27) enter Omaha as one of the hottest teams in the nation after knocking off Vanderbilt in the Nashville Super Regional on Monday.
Mississippi State, which was 14-15 at the end of March, will face Washington in Saturday’s second game at approximately 7 p.m.
While it’s certainly not an easy path, one could argue that this year’s bracket – along with how well the Hogs are playing lately – gives Arkansas its most realistic chance at finally capturing a national championship.
“It wouldn’t be about me,” Van Horn said when asked what a title would mean to the program. “It would be about all the players that have come through here. It’d be for Coach (Norm) DeBriyn. When they first joined the Southeast Conference, they had to play at the fairgrounds over here. The powers of the league would come over here and make fun of them and laugh at them about their facilities. He endured all of that.
“It would be big. Real big.”