Tennessee baseball is the new No. 1 team in the country, but with two weeks remaining in the regular season the Vols still aren’t in first place in the SEC standings.
The Vols enter the home stretch of the regular season 17-7 in SEC play and one game behind Kentucky (18-6 SEC) for first place in the conference.
Tony Vitello’s seventh Tennessee team is tied with Arkansas for second place in the conference standings as all three of Wildcats, Vols and Razorbacks are in the heat of the SEC Championship race. Texas A&M (16-8 SEC) is the one team that also remains in contention but after LSU took two out of three over the Aggies last weekend in Baton Rouge, their title path is much less clear.
That’s where things stand entering the final two weeks of the regular season, but what does every team’s remaining schedule look like?
Tennessee travels to Nashville to face a struggling Vanderbilt (11-13 SEC) team this weekend before returning to Knoxville to conclude the regular season with a three-game series against South Carolina (13-11 SEC).
First place Kentucky heads to Florida (10-14 SEC) this weekend for a three-game series before returning home to face Vanderbilt (11-13 SEC) in the final series of the regular season.
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Arkansas has the hardest remaining schedule of the group by far. The Razorbacks host a strong Mississippi State (14-10 SEC) team in a three-game series this weekend before traveling to Texas A&M (16-8 SEC) to conclude the regular season.
Tennessee caught a break with its schedule this year. The three SEC teams they don’t play this season are the three teams atop the SEC West standings— Arkansas, Texas A&M and Mississippi State.
In case of a tie, Tennessee holds the head-to-head tiebreaker over Kentucky and the Wildcats hold the head-to-head tiebreaker over Arkansas. Since Arkansas and Tennessee don’t play in the regular season, the tiebreaker between the two teams is their records against common conference opponents.
Those opponents are Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Kentucky, LSU, Missouri, Ole Miss and South Carolina. Arkansas has already played all eight teams, posting an 18-6 SEC record. Tennessee has played seven of the eight teams and posted a 15-6 record.
That means that Tennessee would have to sweep South Carolina to force another round of tiebreaker. The next round of tiebreaker is each team’s record against the highest-seeded team that both have faced. That team is already locked into being Kentucky and Tennessee would win that tiebreaker.
