Southeastern Conference Baseball Tournament shifting formats in 2025
The Southeastern Conference announced on Thursday changes to the league tournament beginning in 2025 – the first season the conference will sport 16 teams with the additions of Okalhaoma and Texas. The tournament will be shifting to single-elimination and will continue to be a six-day format.
Under the current format, the top-12 teams in the final 14-team regular season standings participate in a hybrid single/double elimination setting. This will continue for the 2024 season as the tournament is set to take place in Hoover, Alabama on May 21-26.
The new format will continue to showcase four games each on Tuesday and Wednesday, two games on Thursday, Friday and Saturday with the championship game on Sunday. Here’s the difference: seeds 9-16 will play on Tuesday with seeds 5-8 receiving a BYE on Wednesday. Seeds 1-4, again determined by the regular season final standings, will receive a double-bye to games on Thursday or Friday.
It was announced last year that, upon expansion of the Conference in 2025, the SEC baseball regular season will continue to consist of 30 conference games for each team made up three-game series played over ten weekends. Under the new scheduling format, each team will play two permanent opponents (Tennessee’s are Vanderbilt and Alabama) and eight rotating opponents on an annual basis and standings will be kept in a single-standings format with no divisions.
SEC Baseball Tournament format (beginning May 2025)
Tuesday
Game 1: Seed No. 9 vs. Seed No. 16
Game 2: Seed No. 12 vs. Seed No. 13
Game 3: Seed No. 10 vs. Seed No. 15
Game 4: Seed No. 11 vs. Seed No. 14
Wednesday
Game 5: Winner Game 1 vs. Seed No. 8
Game 6: Winner Game 2 vs. Seed No. 5
Game 7: Winner Game 3 vs. Seed No. 7
Game 8: Winner Game 4 vs. Seed No. 6
Thursday
Game 9: Winner Game 5 vs. Seed No. 1
Game 10: Winner Game 6 vs. Seed No. 4
Friday
Game 11: Winner Game 7 vs. Seed No. 2
Game 12: Winner Game 8 vs. Seed No. 3
Saturday
Game 13: Winner Game 9 vs. Winner Game 10
Game 14: Winner Game 11 vs. Winner Game 12
Sunday
Game 15: Championship – Winner Game 13 vs. Winner Game 14
