The 2025 Southeastern Conference baseball tournament in the Birmingham suburb of Hoover will definitely be team-friendly.
Will it be fan-friendly?
When Missouri and Texas A&M joined the SEC for the 2012-13 school year to form a 14-member collection, the league announced that its baseball tournament would contain 12 teams with a single-elimination first round and a double-elimination format once the field was reduced to eight. The league now has 16 schools with the addition of Oklahoma and Texas, and all 16 teams will compete in a single-elimination format throughout the five-day event that starts Tuesday morning at Hoover Met Stadium.
“Personally, I don’t like it,” Vanderbilt coach Tim Corbin said this past Saturday after his Commodores completed a three-game sweep of Kentucky. “I’m not complaining, but I think it was me, Jay Johnson at LSU, and, I think, (Arkansas coach) Dave Van Horn who spoke up about it. I just thought from a fan standpoint that we might lose a little bit of fans just because you’re really not going to make that trip unless you know there are some games to be played.
“I’m anxious to see how it works out.”