Dave Van Horn on eliminating divisions: 'I made it well known I don't like it'

The SEC is adding two new teams, Texas and Oklahoma, following the 2024 season. With that, baseball is moving away from divisions starting with the 2025 season. It’s a move that Arkansas Razorbacks head coach Dave Van Horn isn’t thrilled with.

Van Horn explained that typically the SEC follows an MLB model, and this is a diversion from that. On top of that, he sees real issues with competitiveness if the conference doesn’t have divisions.

“I made it well known that I don’t like it,” Dave Van Horn said. “I don’t like top to bottom, one through 16. Baseball is divisions. Look at the big leagues. It seems like we always kind of follow their trend for the most part. Like, I’m surprised we still can shift past the base. I think that’s probably coming down the road too defensively.”

Dave Van Horn explained that divisions make it so everyone is more likely to be competing for something. That way, late in the season, there aren’t teams without anything to play for. On top of that, if there are teams who don’t have anything to play for, it could create an unfair competitive field.

“I think there should be divisions. I think it keeps everybody engaged. I think if you’ve got maybe four divisions, or at a minimum two, you’ve got teams that are going to fight to the end. You know? Next year, you’ve got a team that’s in second place trying to come in first and they’re fighting to get through the weekend,” Van Horn said.

“And maybe somebody that’s right on their tail or just ahead of them is playing a team that’s in 15th place. You know, if I’m in 15th place, I’m playing my guys for next year. I’m playing the youngsters. We’re gonna finish out and see if we can get better. I think that a lot of coaches will do that. They’re gonna play for the future and is that fair to the team that’s trying to win a championship when the team ahead of them maybe played that same team in the middle of the season and it was a different fight? So, I don’t know. I like divisions. It keeps fans interested more and go from there.”

The coaches did have the chance to speak about the change. However, as Dave Van Horn explained, the direction of the conversation was always to go away from divisions.

“But I could talk about that for a while and I mentioned that at coaches meetings when they brought it up, and they looked at me funny. I could just tell, we weren’t going to do divisions even though we were talking about it. So, baseball is about divisions.”

As of now, the SEC is divided into SEC East and West. If the conference were to stick with divisions at 16 teams, those would either have swelled to eight teams each or be divided into four total divisions. However, it was decided to avoid that there would no longer be divisions.

“Yeah, we had a voice in it, and man it was mixed. But you could just feel it, where it was going…It’s what they’re gonna do. It’s just what they were gonna do,” Van Horn said. “So, I don’t know. I guess we kind of had a vote.”