HOOVER, Ala. — The 2026 SEC Baseball Tournament is down to two teams. The first-ever SEC Tournament championship game appearance in Georgia Bulldogs program history, against a Cinderella No. 7-seed Arkansas Razorbacks team that has now won three straight elimination games. First pitch is Sunday at 2 p.m. ET (1 p.m. CT) on ABC, with the trophy on the line for the first time at the Hoover Met since 2025.
Memorial Day weekend. Four straight rain-affected days in Hoover. One trophy.
Sunday’s championship game at a glance
Game 15: No. 1 Georgia Bulldogs vs. No. 7 Arkansas Razorbacks
Time: 2 p.m. ET (1 p.m. CT)
TV: ABC (over-the-air via local ABC affiliates)
Streaming: ABC.com / ESPN+ (subscription or cable login)
Records: Georgia 45-12 (24-7 SEC); Arkansas 39-19 (18-13 SEC)
D1Baseball rankings (May 18): Georgia No. 4, Arkansas No. 12
Series context: Georgia took 2-of-3 in Fayetteville in April. Arkansas won Game 1; Georgia outscored Arkansas 31-17 in the final two games of the series.
Georgia: the first-ever final
The No. 1 seed Georgia Bulldogs (45-12, 24-7 SEC) reached Sunday’s championship game with a stunning 8-7 comeback win over No. 5 seed Florida on Saturday — erasing a 6-0 deficit, never hitting a home run, and walking off the field with the first SEC Tournament championship game berth in program history.
It is not an exaggeration to call this the most consequential weekend in Georgia baseball’s modern history. The Bulldogs are 31-52 all-time in SEC Tournament play, with three previous finals appearances (the last in 1989) and zero titles. Wes Johnson — the 2026 SEC Coach of the Year, in his third year leading the program — is one win away from delivering the conference tournament trophy that has eluded the Bulldogs for the entirety of their program history.
“It’s still baseball,” Johnson said in Saturday’s postgame. “What’s different in our sport than any other sport — we’ve gotta show up tomorrow. The score doesn’t roll over. Emotions don’t roll over. It’s a really long game. You can’t panic, you can’t get too emotional at times — it’ll take you out of your approach.”
Georgia’s offensive identity has been home runs all year. The Bulldogs lead the country with 148 home runs this season. The Saturday comeback over Florida was the first time all year they won a game without going deep — and Florida is the only team Georgia has not homered against across four matchups (regular season + tournament) in 2026.
Daniel Jackson — the 2026 SEC Player of the Year and the first catcher in Division I history with a 25-25 season (.394, 27 HR, 25 SB) — is the anchor. Brennan Hudson (17 HRs) and Kolby Branch (17 HRs) flank him. The bottom of the order, led by Kenny Ishikawa, Ryan Black, and Tre Phelps, drove the Saturday comeback with two-out singles and sacrifice flies.
Pitching: Joey Volchko (Game 9 starter), Dylan Vigue (Game 13 starter), Zach Brown, Caden Aoki, Justin Byrd, and Tyler Pitzer. Byrd was the postgame revelation Saturday — Johnson called his fastball “electric” with the ride and carry to attack the top of the zone. Aoki threw 3 innings of long relief Saturday at his planned 50-65 pitch count, which Johnson confirmed would make him unavailable for Sunday.
Georgia’s starting rotation for Sunday is undeclared. Johnson, asked in the postgame, said the bullpen is rested and the call will likely depend on game flow.
Arkansas: the Cinderella run
The No. 7 seed Arkansas Razorbacks (39-19, 18-13 SEC) are now three elimination wins deep at the Hoover Met. The bracket math: Tennessee 8-4 on Wednesday. Texas 8-1 on Friday. Auburn 2-1 on Saturday night.
The Saturday win over Auburn was the kind that defines a tournament run. Cam Kozeal — the second baseman who’s been the offensive star of the week — singled in the tying run in the fifth inning. Then catcher Ryder Helfrick, who’d been struggling at the plate per head coach Dave Van Horn’s earlier admission, launched a solo home run to left field in the top of the eighth that proved to be the game-winner. Closer Ethan McElvain shut the door across the final 3.1 innings of one-run baseball.
Through three SEC Tournament games, Arkansas has now scored 18 runs, allowed 6, and used its bullpen to throw 21.1 scoreless innings combined across the Tennessee, Texas, and Auburn wins.
“We can piece it together,” Van Horn said after Friday’s win over Texas, asked about his Saturday plans. “Whoever we start probably won’t plan on pitching it very long.”
The Razorbacks delivered exactly that on Saturday. Cooper Dossett started, gave up the lone Auburn run on a Bub Terrell HR in the second, and exited after 2.1 innings. Petrovic, DeCremer, Fisher, and McElvain combined for the rest. Auburn’s offense was held to 7 hits — none for extra bases beyond a McCraine double in the 4th — across the rest of the game.
Hunter Dietz, the All-SEC ace and MLB Pipeline’s No. 18 overall draft prospect who took a line drive off his shin in the first inning of Friday’s win, remains a question for Sunday. Gabe Gaeckle, who threw 6 scoreless innings of relief Friday, is presumably unavailable. The Arkansas pitching depth has been the story of the tournament; the Sunday starter remains uncalled.
The Hawaiian baseball pipeline that anchors the WBN angle on this team has been front-and-center all weekend. Kuhio Aloy, Nolan Souza, and Maika Niu — three native-born Hawaiian student-athletes on the Arkansas roster, the most in program history — have been part of the lineup throughout the run. Aloy’s brother Wehiwa won the 2025 Golden Spikes Award. Souza is a Punahou School graduate. Even Texas head coach Jim Schlossnagle, in his Friday postgame, name-checked Kuhio Aloy unprompted: “I don’t know if they’re getting their Aloy back or not, but just the physical team that knows how to win.” (See our Saturday semifinals “Who to Cheer For” guide for the full Hawaiian baseball at Arkansas breakdown.)
The April matchup: a 31-17 Georgia statement
The two programs met in Fayetteville in April. Georgia won the series 2-1, and the way the Bulldogs won it has bearing on Sunday’s pitching matchup. Arkansas took the opener. Then Georgia outscored the Razorbacks 31-17 in the final two games — including a 26-run outburst that ranks as Arkansas’s worst home defeat of the season.
Dylan Vigue, Georgia’s likely Sunday starter (or whoever replaces him after his Saturday outing), had a 2.51 ERA through the early portion of the conference schedule including that Arkansas series. He has surrendered 15 earned runs across his last 12⅔ innings since returning from a forearm cramp on May 2 — a 10.66 ERA across his last four starts against Missouri, LSU, Auburn, and Florida.
Hunter Dietz, who started one of those April games for Arkansas, is now the wild-card health question for Sunday after taking a comebacker off his shin in Friday’s first inning. Whether the Razorback ace can go remains the most consequential pitching question on either side of the matchup.
The lineup-vs-lineup picture
Georgia leads the country with 148 home runs but just won a semifinal without one. Arkansas has 80+ home runs and 80+ stolen bases — only the third SEC team in the last decade to clear both marks. Daniel Jackson (Georgia, 27 HR, 25 SB) and Cam Kozeal (Arkansas, 20 HR, 14 SB) are the marquee bats. Both staffs come in with elite arms still in reserve.
A No. 7 seed has not won the SEC Tournament since 2010, when South Carolina ran the bracket. The Razorbacks are bidding to become only the second No. 7 in tournament history to lift the trophy. Combined with Georgia’s bid for the program’s first-ever championship, Sunday’s matchup is the kind of finals pairing the SEC Tournament rarely produces: two teams playing for something neither has ever done.
Both rosters arrive Sunday with NCAA Tournament selection bids essentially clinched. Georgia is locked in as a top-eight national seed and a likely regional host at Foley Field in Athens. Arkansas is in strong position for an NCAA Regional host bid at Baum-Walker Stadium in Fayetteville, pending Monday’s selection show.
The mid-major question
The SEC Tournament has been a topic of broader baseball-policy conversation this week, and Sunday’s matchup brings the conversation forward. At the same moment Georgia and Arkansas are competing for the SEC Tournament championship, more than 30 mid-major and small-conference programs across the country are wrapping up their own conference tournaments — with the winners earning automatic NCAA Tournament regional bids that will then place them, on average, against three of the country’s top 16 seeded teams in the opening round.
Multiple SEC fan threads this week have surfaced the underlying tension: Florida fans noted in real time on r/CollegeBaseball during Saturday’s semifinal that “the stakes were always quite different here. With a win, Florida can clinch a Top 8 seed. Georgia already has that clinched — definitely has less to play for.” A Georgia fan in the same thread, before the comeback materialized, openly posted: “I don’t think I’d be too upset if Wes decided to mail this one in. Don’t risk any injuries and prepare for regionals.”
That is the asymmetry. Sunday’s championship — between two teams who are already in the NCAA Tournament — is fundamentally a different kind of game than the SEC Tournament games of 1989 or 2010, when an SEC team’s at-large bid was sometimes a coin flip. The stakes for the trophy are real; the stakes for the postseason are not in question.
For the SEC, the conference tournament is a showcase, a brand event, and a competitive proving ground for arms and lineups one week before regionals. For programs like Western Kentucky, Stetson, or Northeastern — who have to win their conference tournaments to even get to NCAA regional weekend — the bar is higher and the consequences sharper. A long-form discussion on whether power-conference tournaments should be restructured, contracted, or eliminated entirely is one that bubbles up on Reddit and college baseball Twitter every May. Sunday’s matchup, between a Georgia team that already had everything locked up and an Arkansas team that has nothing left to prove for postseason inclusion, will be Exhibit A on both sides of that argument.
But the trophy is still real. The history is still real. For Wes Johnson and the Bulldogs, the first-ever SEC Tournament championship game appearance is a generational program moment that’s been waiting since 1989. For Dave Van Horn and the Razorbacks, three straight elimination wins as a No. 7 seed is the kind of tournament run that gets remembered for years.
How to watch from home
Sunday’s championship game airs on ABC at 2 p.m. ET (1 p.m. CT) — over-the-air via local ABC affiliates, plus the following streaming options:
- ABC.com (with cable login)
- ESPN+ (subscription required)
- Fubo (free trial available, carries ABC in most markets)
- YouTube TV, Hulu Live, DirecTV Stream, Sling TV (all carry ABC in most markets)
- Local ABC affiliate over-the-air broadcast with antenna (no subscription required)
This is the most-watched broadcast slot of the entire SEC Tournament. ABC’s Memorial Day weekend baseball window has historically drawn the largest single-game audience of the tournament.
Memorial Day weekend at Hoover
Sunday at the Hoover Met is the kind of day the SEC Tournament was built for. The 2025 championship drew one of the largest crowds in tournament history, and Sunday 2026 has the chance to add to that — with both fan bases known for traveling and Memorial Day weekend already producing top-five Hoover crowds across the Wednesday and Saturday sessions per Auburn head coach Butch Thompson.
The forecast: partly cloudy, low 80s, light winds. After four straight days of weather interruptions in Hoover, Sunday is the first day of the tournament expected to play without delay.
The bracket from here
Sunday’s winner lifts the SEC Tournament trophy. Both teams then turn the page to Monday’s NCAA Tournament selection show (11 a.m. CT on ESPN2) and the start of NCAA Regional play on Friday, May 29.
Final SEC Tournament bracket:
Eliminated: Ole Miss, Kentucky, South Carolina, Oklahoma, Missouri, Vanderbilt, Tennessee, LSU, Mississippi State, Alabama, Texas, Texas A&M, Florida, Auburn.
Sunday’s championship: No. 1 Georgia vs. No. 7 Arkansas.
For more on the 2026 SEC Tournament
- Game 14 Recap: Arkansas 2, Auburn 1
- Game 13 Recap: Georgia 8, Florida 7
- Game 12 Recap: Auburn 7, Texas A&M 0
- Game 11 Recap: Arkansas 8, Texas 1
- Game 10 Recap: Florida 13, Alabama 3 (8 inn., run rule)
- Game 9 Recap: Georgia 5, Mississippi State 3
- Game 8 Recap: Auburn 3, LSU 1
- Game 7 Recap: Arkansas 8, Tennessee 4
- Game 6 Recap: Florida 8, Vanderbilt 3
- Game 5 Recap: Mississippi State 12, Missouri 2 (7 inn.)
- Game 4 Recap: LSU 6, Oklahoma 2
- Game 3 Recap: Tennessee 11, South Carolina 6
- Game 2 Recap: Vanderbilt 8, Kentucky 5
- Game 1 Recap: Missouri 10, Ole Miss 8
- How to Watch: Saturday Semifinals (and Who to Cheer For)
- How to Watch: Friday Quarterfinals
- How to Watch: Original Tournament Preview
Official sources
2026 SEC Baseball Tournament Schedule (Final)
All times Eastern.
Tuesday, May 19 — First Round
Game 1: Missouri 10, Ole Miss 8
Game 2: Vanderbilt 8, Kentucky 5
Game 3: Tennessee 11, South Carolina 6
Game 4: LSU 6, Oklahoma 2
Wednesday, May 20 — Second Round
Game 5: Mississippi State 12, Missouri 2 (7 inn.)
Game 6: Florida 8, Vanderbilt 3
Game 7: Arkansas 8, Tennessee 4
Game 8: Auburn 3, LSU 1
Thursday, May 21 — Quarterfinals
Game 9: Georgia 5, Mississippi State 3
Game 10: Florida 13, Alabama 3 (8 inn., run rule)
Friday, May 22 — Quarterfinals
Game 11: Arkansas 8, Texas 1
Game 12: Auburn 7, Texas A&M 0
Saturday, May 23 — Semifinals
Game 13: Georgia 8, Florida 7
Game 14: Arkansas 2, Auburn 1
Sunday, May 24 — Championship (ABC)
Game 15: No. 1 Georgia vs. No. 7 Arkansas — 2 p.m. ET
