MLB News

Home

Teams

Quizzes

Watch

Newsletter

Three potential breakout candidates for Arkansas' postseason run

Originally posted on Arkansas Razorbacks on SI
By Daniel Shi | Last updated May 20, 2025 7:39 PM ET

So far this year, Arkansas has followed the same script of the two years before them.

Win a bunch of regular season games, finish near the top of the SEC. This team has almost certainly already clinched top eight seed and the path to the College World Series should run through Baum- Walker Stadium as one of two teams with 20 conference wins.

The next part of the script the team might not want to follow from its predecessors. Both the 2023 team and 2024 team were unable to make the home-field advantage count, crashing out in the regional round both times.

Coach Dave Van Horn was candid after the regular season ended about what the team needs to make a deep run to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.

"Other guys have to step up," Van Horn said. "Usually, to play for a while, you have to have maybe one guy just really come on for you, whether it's an arm or a hitter that maybe was OK during the year, but now he's just stepped it up. There's a lot of those stories over the years of teams that play all the way to Omaha."

Look no further than two of the teams that made it Omaha last year.

Texas A&M made it to the championship series despite losing its starting shortstop and future first round pick Braden Montgomery to a season ending injury in the Super Regional.

Kaeden Kent with just 77 at-bats on the season up until that point, filled in admirably the rest of the way, going 14-for-33 (.424), including a walk-off grand slam to punch the ticket to Omaha.

Florida has a similar story. Outfielder Ashton Wilson had just 21 at-bats in the regular season but became the MVP of the Super Regional round, going 9-for-21, carrying the Gators to the semifinal of the College World Series.

Here are three potential candidates for Arkansas to fill that role for the Hogs.

McEntire is the most obvious candidate on the list and showed his breakout potential with an 11 up, 11 down performance in the series finale against Tennessee.

Up until that point, he had been relegated to mostly mop-up duty in SEC play, throwing just 10 innings. But with the performance against the Vols, his SEC ERA is down to 1.32 in 13 2/3 innings.

He's also one of the few players on the team with postseason experience beyond the regional, throwing 5 2/3 innings of scoreless baseball in the 2022 Chapel Hill Super Regional.

Arkansas could really use the early season version of Iredale. At the start of SEC play, his average sat at .431 (22-for-51).

Since then, he's 31-for-122 with just six of his 13 homers in over double the amount of at-bats. His .254 average is by far the lowest over that stretch among qualified hitters.

Gibler has shown flashes of his wipeout stuff, ranking fourth on the team with 45 strikeouts despite being ninth on the team in the innings (23 1/3).

He's been better of late with eight of his last 10 appearances being scoreless and shaved over a run off his season ERA from 5.28 to 3.86.

Arkansas waits for its opponent in the quarterfinals of the SEC Tournament 3 p.m. Friday. The game will be broadcast on SEC Network.