Beef and major talent make Arkansas vs. Tennessee 2025’s best super regional and one of the best we’ve seen

The super regional round of the NCAA Baseball Tournament always makes for captivating television. It’s the 16 best teams in the nation — or at least the 16 that outlasted everyone else — battling it out for a spot in the College World Series. 

There’s pressure and there’s drama. Just take Arkansas, for example. The Razorbacks may very well boast the most complete roster in college baseball, but they’ve been in this position before. They’ve made 11 trips to the CWS — including four since 2015 — but they’ve never won a national title. 

Tennessee, meanwhile, is trying to defend its College World Series crown after marching out of Omaha victorious for the first time in program history last season. The Vols, who boast the third-best odds to win the CWS according to FanDuel Sportsbook, will have to go through Fayetteville to do that, and the Razorbacks will have to defend their home turf against a hot Tennessee team to avoid the shame of another empty postseason.

Those are the stakes in the Fayetteville Super Regional, which is set to begin Saturday at 5 p.m. ET. 

That’s enough to make this series well worth tuning into. 

But a deeper look below the hood shows that this weekend’s clash between the Vols and the Razorbacks is easily the most enticing super regional series of 2025, with the potential to be one of the best college baseball has ever seen. 

Talent galore

Arkansas’ series against Tennessee may as well be a de facto MLB All-Star Futures Game. There’s going to be future professional talent all over the diamond in Fayetteville. 

Tennessee has the SEC Pitcher of the Year in Liam Doyle, a fiery flamethrower who is the exact type of madman you want on the mound. Arkansas boasts the SEC Player of the Year in Wehiwa Aloy, a complete shortstop with a nice glove that can hit for power and average. Both made CBS Sports’ list of the top-10 MLB Draft prospects in the NCAA Tournament, and they’re certainly the headliners. 

But Tennessee and Arkansas have a combined 10 players that landed inside the top 100 of MLB.com’s latest 2025 MLB Draft prospect rankings. 

Liam Doyle	Tennessee	LHP	9
Gavin Kilen	Tennessee	INF	17
Wehiwa Aloy	Arkansas	SS	22
Andrew Fischer	Tennessee	1B	29
Zach Root	Arkansas	LHP	43
Gage Wood	Arkansas	RHP	50
Charles Davalan	Arkansas	OF	55
Dean Curley	Tennessee	INF	58
Marcus Phillips	Tennessee	RHP	65
AJ Russell	Tennessee	RHP	69

Three of Tennessee’s four infielders will likely hear their names called within the first two rounds of the draft. Kilen was on a tear before a hamstring injury cost him a good portion of the regular season, but he’s recently returned to form and is batting .363 with 15 home runs. 

Though Curley’s defense has taken a drastic step back — Tennessee had to move him from shortstop to third base and then second base to compensate — his bat’s coming around. He had four hits, six RBI and a home run in Tennessee’s last three regional games. 

Fischer might be the best of the bunch. He leads the SEC with 24 home runs and he’s been on base in all 63 of Tennessee’s games this season. He’s patient at the plate and makes opposing pitchers work to force him out. 

With Arkansas it’s about the arms. Root, a former East Carolina transfer, is a hard-throwing lefty with a nice curveball and changeup to confuse batters. 

Wood missed a lot of time due to injury but he’s started to find his groove lately. He struck out 13 of 22 batters faced in Arkansas’ Fayetteville Regional final win against Creighton to send the Hawgs to supers. He’s also allowed more than three earned runs in a single game just once since returning to action in mid-April. 

That’s without mentioning all of the talent that isn’t draft-eligible until 2026, like Arkansas pitcher Gabe Gaeckle — a former starter that’s flourished in a more recent bullpen role — and catcher Ryder Helfrick, who’s hit 13 balls out of the park with a .329 batting average. 

Arkansas’ facility management team is going to have to save plenty of seats inside Baum-Walker Stadium for scouts. 

Vitello, Van Horn’s history

Tennessee coach Tony Vitello and Arkansas coach Dave Van Horn go way back. Vitello joined Van Horn’s Arkansas staff in 2014 after three seasons as an assistant under current Texas coach Jim Schlossnagle at TCU. 

Vitello quickly established himself as one of the top recruiters in the nation with the Razorbacks. He was also responsible for developing 2015 SEC Player of the Year Andrew Benintendi who was the first and only — until Aloy, at least — Razorback to earn that honor. 

Vitello left in June 2017 to take the Tennessee job. Arkansas swept Tennessee in 2019 — the first meeting between Vitello and Van Horn as head coaches — and took two out of three games in Knoxville in 2021. But the actual series result isn’t what fans remember most from that weekend. 

After the Razorbacks secured a 3-2 win in Game 3, broadcast cameras caught Vitello and Van Horn embroiled in a heated argument. It reached a point where the two had to be separated by assistant coaches. 

Van Horn later said that the incident was in relation to a recruiting battle between the two programs, while Vitello said after the May 2021 game that he “brought up some off-the-field stuff.” Though memorable, the incident often gets overblown. 

Both Vitello and Van Horn have said in the years since that their relationship is fine. They even got dinner together in Nashville shortly after kerfuffle. Vitello even went so far as to thank Van Horn after Tennessee’s victory in the 2024 College World Series finals. 

“What they need to realize is their program definitely had a hand in what happened tonight, there’s no question about that. I’m thankful for my personal opportunity,” Vitello said. “Guys like Zander (Sechrist) and Dylan (Dreiling) are benefactors of who I think is the best coach in the country, and coach Van Horn is who I’m talking about.”

Still, given the talent and boisterous personalities on both teams and coaching staffs, games between Tennessee and Arkansas always feature fireworks. Adding some fuel to the fire, it hasn’t taken very long for Vitello’s Vols to catch up to Van Horn’s Razorbacks near the top of the SEC. 

Here’s a comparison of Arkansas and Tennessee’s résumés since Vitello left Fayetteville ahead of the 2018 season: 

Arkansas	334-127	.724	2	1	5	3	0
Tennessee	331-128	.721	2	2	5	3	1

All five of Tennessee’s super regional appearances have come in the last five seasons. That’s more than any other program in the same span, including Arkansas, which has made it to the super regional round three times since 2021. 

The talent on display and recent history between the two programs is enough to make the Fayetteville Super must-watch television. But Tennessee and Arkansas — two of the sport’s premier programs — have never faced off with this much on the line. It’s what college baseball dreams are made of.