FAYETTEVILLE -- Arkansas and Tennessee, Part 2, will take place beginning Saturday in the Fayetteville Super Regional.
The two will meet at 4 p.m. Saturday and televised on ESPN. Sunday's game begins at 2 p.m. also on ESPN and then Monday is to be determined.
Arkansas (46-13) reached the Super Regional by sweeping through the Fayetteville Regional undefeated. Tennessee (46-17), on the other hand, had to work to get through the Knoxville Regional. The Vols defeated Wake Forest, a team that had beaten them Sunday, 11-5 on Monday afternoon advancing to once again face the Hogs.
The two teams met at Baum-Walker Stadium earlier this season. The two teams clashed on May 15-17 with Arkansas winning two games. The Vols took the opener 10-7 before the Razorbacks took 10-8 and 8-4 victories.
The series saw both aces take losses. Arkansas' Zach Root was the loser in Thursday's game. Tennessee ace Liam Doyle started the Friday game and only lasted 4.2 innings. He allowed 11 hits, eight runs, walked two and fanned 10. Cole Gibler got the win for Arkansas with Christian Foutch earning the save. Gage Wood got the win on Saturday and Will McEntire picked up the save.
Tennessee Coach Tony Vitello, former assistant at Arkansas, was asked about playing Arkansas in the Super Regional.
“I guess they won. Did they win? Vitello said. “Not that I didn’t expect them to. I talked to those guys before all this started, but I didn’t know it was complete. You know when you are in the backyard, at least in the neighborhood I grew up in, everybody meets out on the street and you play a bunch of games, whenever I lost, maybe my dad did it to me, I was kind of a little punk.
“But I always wanted ‘let’s run it back, let’s redo it.’ At the very least, my first reaction is we want to be playing this time of year as does anybody that is left…It’s a blessing to be playing. This team has been confident going on the road and at the very least they get a chance to redo the thing.”
Arkansas, Tennessee, LSU and Auburn are the only four SEC teams that survived the various regionals this past weekend of the 13 who played. Arkansas' Dave Van Horn was grateful for his team playing as it did.
"I feel great about it," Van Horn said. "I feel very fortunate. It’s not easy. I mean, we’ve sat here two years in a row and we didn’t get out of here. We went and won somebody else’s regional in ’22. In ’21 we won our regional and got beat in the last game by a run to go to Omaha. I’ve kind of been on all sides of it. You never take it for granted, at all. It’s like I told the guys when we left Hoover, you have got to go earn it. Nobody’s going to give you anything. You look at who’s winning around the country, you start thinking you’re all that, you’ll get it handed to you. These guys, they stayed humble and they got after it and we get to hang out together again for at least another week."