Hogs learn SEC Tournament schedule, status

FAYETTEVILLE — The No. 5 Razorbacks have received a double bye at the SEC Tournament and will play their first game on Friday at 3 p.m. against one of three teams.

Arkansas is the No. 2 seed for this tournament finishing just behind Texas. LSU is the third seed and Vanderbilt No. 4. On Tuesday, No. 15 South Carolina will take on No. 10 Florida at 5:30 p.m. in the first round. The winner will face No. 7 Ole Miss on Wednesday at 5:30 p.m. The winner of the Wednesday Ole Miss game will face the Razorbacks on Friday.

The tournament is a single elimination format. Arkansas Coach Dave Van Horn isn’t worried about Arkansas’ post-season status after beating Tennessee twice to take that series. Van Horn was asked Saturday if Hogs have done enough to be a national seed (Top 8) which would allow them host a Super Regional if they get through the Fayetteville Regional?

“Oh yeah,” Van Horn said. “Yeah. Twenty wins in our league. That’s probably the main thing, and that’s probably the main thing.”

Arkansas got to 20 wins by taking two of three from the Vols. Van Horn talked about what it means to win 20 games in the SEC.

“Yeah, it’s hard,” Van Horn said. “It’s hard to do it. I think this is three years in a row. I think one of you guys brought it up last night and I hadn’t really thought about it, and then coach said something right after the game when we were walking out to the guys. ‘Hey, that’s 20 three years in a row’. And I’m like, ‘yeah, tough to do. Congratulations’. It just means that you show up every weekend and you play, and you’re probably pretty good. You don’t make a lot of mistakes, because this league will hurt you. I mean, look at the games this weekend. Teams taking leads into the ninth and giving up homer after homer. Things happen, and the players are good. To win 20 in the toughest division, or the toughest league in the country, it’s special to us.”

The Razorbacks lead the country with 32 wins at home. They have only lost four times. They are only 8-7 away thus proving Van Horn’s point of glad they are playing at home until the College World Series if they qualify.

“Well, we’ve played a lot of games at home, first, and then we’ve done really well here,” Van Horn said. “I think we lost one midweek game, that, give Missouri State credit. They scored five in the ninth to tie it, I think, or to win it. I don’t remember what happened. I think to tie it. We went extra innings and got off to a really good start, I think, in conference play against South Carolina. We won four opening weekend against Washington State. I just think we just had a lot of guys that, if they didn’t play on the weekend, and we plugged them in, they played, and they played well. I mean, you think of some of the guys on the team that, a couple guys that are hitting .300 that didn’t play a lot, and they’re right at it.

“Thinking about (Carson) Boles, really. Put him in the midweek, he hit a double and a homer, double and a single, and then he’d look at me funny on the weekend, like, ‘Hey, how come I’m not playing?’ I felt bad. I even told him one day. I said, ‘I feel bad that I’m not playing you, but those other guys, just hang in there, keep doing, you’re going to help us. And he did. I think against Texas, he hit a two-run homer on the opening game to give us a lead, and then we got after it the rest of the weekend. He didn’t hardly play at LSU, because now Maxwell is back, but I just feel like home games we played well here. The crowds were good. The weather was not good at the beginning. It’s been great lately. Our guys are comfortable here, and we field the ball. We don’t make a lot of errors.”

Click here for SEC Tournament bracket.