FAYETTEVILLE — The first Arkansas baseball schedule of the SEC’s 16-team era is here.
The full 2025 slate was announced Thursday afternoon and features 56 games, which is the maximum allowed by the NCAA during the regular season.
Nearly half of those games will be against teams that made the NCAA Tournament last season. Included among those are eight of 10 SEC series, as well as single-game non-conference matchups with Grambling, Kansas State and Oral Roberts.
Coming off back-to-back seasons in which they earned a top-8 national seed only to lose a home regional, the Razorbacks are seeking their first trip to Omaha since 2022.
Here are a few takeaways from this year’s schedule…
Arlington Becomes “Revenge Invitational”
The folks in charge of the College Baseball Series in Arlington, Texas, could not have dreamed up a better scenario than the matchups they have for Arkansas on the second weekend of the season.
In an event head coach Dave Van Horn has openly adored since it began at Globe Life Field, the Razorbacks will face Kansas State (Feb. 21), TCU (Feb. 22) and Michigan (Feb. 23).
While Arkansas has played the Wolverines just once before in baseball, the Wildcats and Horned Frogs are very familiar opponents. In fact, the two purple-clad Big 12 teams have ended the Razorbacks’ last two seasons.
TCU won the 2023 Fayetteville Regional in dominant fashion, outscoring Arkansas 32-9 in two games (50-15 in three games if you include an earlier regular-season matchup), while Kansas State jumped all over Hagen Smith and shocked the Razorbacks this past season.
Michigan will be looking for some payback of its own, as Arkansas hung on to win last year’s game in Arlington – the first all-time meeting between the schools – by a final score of 4-3.
Revenge has been a common theme of Arkansas’ games in Arlington. Last year, it opened the event with its first matchup against Oregon State since the 2018 College World Series finals after Beavers fans brought up talk of the Hogs getting “slaughtered” in DFW. The Hogs have also faced Oklahoma State down there each of the last two seasons after beating the Cowboys in the wild 2022 Stillwater Regional.
The Closing Gauntlet
It’d be hard to imagine another team having a closing stretch of games quite like the Razorbacks have in 2025.
The back half of Arkansas’ SEC slate features the four teams that played in the last two College World Series finals — Texas A&M (April 17-19), at Florida (April 25-27), at LSU (May 9-11) and Tennessee (May 15-17). The gap in that stretch? A home series against Texas (May 2-4) and head coach Jim Schlossnagle, which led the Aggies to the CWS finals last year.
Those last three series, all of which are in May and aren’t interrupted by any midweek games, have to be particularly enticing for Arkansas baseball fans.
Texas is a traditional rival dating back to the Southwest Conference days and is in its first season as a member of the SEC. LSU has been a major rival in baseball for much of Dave Van Horn’s tenure.
Former Coaches on the Schedule
It hasn’t resulted in a national title, but the Razorbacks have won more games than any other Division I program over the last eight seasons. That remarkable stretch of consistency started in 2017, when Dave Van Horn’s staff featured Tony Vitello as the hitting coach and Wes Johnson as the pitching coach.
Those two assistants overlapped in Fayetteville for just one year, as Vitello was hired as Tennessee’s head coach following that season. Johnson stayed one more season before heading to the big leagues as the Minnesota Twins’ pitching coach, but — after returning to college as an assistant at LSU — is now the head coach at Georgia.
For the first time, both coaches are on Arkansas’ schedule in 2025. The Razorbacks travel to Georgia for a series April 11-13 and then host Tennessee to close out the season May 15-17.
After winning a national championship and coaching Paul Skenes at LSU, Johnson took over a 29-27 team and led the Bulldogs to a 43-17 record in his first season at the helm. They even hosted a super regional and were one win away from reaching the College World Series for the first time since 2008.
Vitello has built the Volunteers into a juggernaut and led them to their first national championship last season. Naturally, a rivalry has developed between Arkansas and Tennessee that might be as heated amongst the fan bases as any nationwide.
If that wasn’t enough to generate excitement, that series will be played at Baum-Walker Stadium to close the season. Playing at home to end the regular season is a rarity for Arkansas. It’ll be only the second time it’s happened since 2011, with the other time being in 2021.
It doesn’t get as much attention, but the Razorbacks will be hosting another Van Horn assistant for a two-game midweek series when Little Rock comes to town April 22-23. The Trojans are led by 10th-year head coach Chris Curry, who was a volunteer assistant for the Razorbacks from 2009-10.
Who Arkansas Baseball Does NOT Play
With the SEC expanding to 16 teams, divisions have been eliminated beginning this year. Arkansas will play Missouri and Ole Miss every season, but the remaining eight conference foes will rotate.
In 2025, usual SEC West rivals Alabama, Auburn and Mississippi State were left off the schedule. It’ll be the first time since joining the conference in 1992 that the Razorbacks don’t play those schools in the regular season.
Arkansas also won’t face Kentucky, which shared the regular-season SEC title with Tennessee last year, or new SEC member Oklahoma.
It’s also worth noting that the SEC Tournament, which is scheduled for May 20-25 in Hoover, Ala., will be single elimination with all 16 teams participating. The top four seeds will receive a double-bye, while seeds 5-8 will get a single bye.
Other Non-Conference Tidbits
- Arkansas opens the season with a four-game series against Washington State beginning Feb. 14. It’ll be the first meeting between the two schools since the 2010 Fayetteville Regional, when the Razorbacks won two of the three matchups to advance to the super regionals. With the implosion of the Pac-12, the Cougars will play in the Mountain West next season.
- Much like last year, the Razorbacks will face each of the other four in-state Division I baseball programs. They’ll play single games against UCA (March 11) and Arkansas State (April 8) and two games against Little Rock (April 22-23) and UAPB (April 1 & April 15). The first of those UAPB games will be Arkansas’ annual game at Dickey-Stephens Park in North Little Rock.
- Meanwhile, for the first time since 2016, Arkansas will play an in-season home-and-home series with Missouri State. The Razorbacks will host the Bears on March 25 and then travel to Springfield on April 29. The two schools did that each season from 2005-09, but have since done it only once (2016).
- Earlier in the season, Arkansas will have its first all-time meeting with Portland. The Pilots will actually be one of the Razorbacks’ three non-conference weekend opponents, meaning they’ll play three games March 7-9.
2025 Arkansas Baseball Schedule
| Dates | Opponents |
|---|---|
| Feb. 14-17 | Washington State |
| Feb. 21 | vs. Kansas State^ |
| Feb. 22 | vs. TCU^ |
| Feb. 23 | vs. Michigan^ |
| Feb. 25 | Grambling |
| Feb. 28-March 2 | Charlotte |
| March 4-5 | ULM |
| March 7-9 | Portland |
| March 11 | UCA |
| March 14-16 | at Ole Miss* |
| March 18-19 | Oral Roberts |
| March 21-23 | South Carolina* |
| March 25 | Missouri State |
| March 28-30 | at Vanderbilt* |
| April 1 | vs. UAPB# |
| April 4-6 | Missouri* |
| April 8 | Arkansas State |
| April 11-13 | at Georgia* |
| April 15 | UAPB |
| April 17-19 | Texas A&M* |
| April 22-23 | Little Rock |
| April 25-27 | at Florida* |
| April 29 | at Missouri State |
| May 2-4 | Texas* |
| May 9-11 | at LSU* |
| May 15-17 | Tennessee* |
| May 20-25 | SEC Tournament (Hoover, Ala.) |
***
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