FAYETTEVILLE — Unfortunately fans and media have become so national championship obsessed that great teams get criticized if they don’t win it all.
Even downright belittled not advancing to basketball’s Final Four or baseball’s College World Series.
Move over Gonzaga. You aren’t the only 2021 nationally No. 1 team conference champion champion team some will judge falling short.
The lone occasion the 31-1 Zags zigged when they should have Zagged, they lost basketball’s national championship game.
Some likely will ditto judgment on Dave Van Horn’s baseball Razorbacks.
Nationally No. 1 the bulk of the season while winning the SEC regular season and SEC Tournament titles, Arkansas won the NCAA Fayetteville Regional. The Razorbacks romped 21-2 opening the Fayetteville Super Regional, then were eliminated 6-5 and 3-2 by North Carolina State at Baum-Walker Stadium.
No College World Series trip to Omaha for them.
Here’s hoping Van Horn and the Razorbacks, though anguishing what could have been, fondly remember what they did. They did plenty. They went 50-13 against a schedule that included six of the other seven top-eight national seeds.
They were the No. 1 national seed for winning the nation’s toughest league, the SEC.
It’s apples and oranges comparing winning a league over a full season vs. the regional and super regional path to Omaha.
Both are great accomplishments. There’s cause to argue winning the tough league even greater.
At Nebraska before returning to Arkansas, UA alum Van Horn always will be remembered coaching the Cornhuskers to their first two College World Series appearances.
Yet Van Horn recalled winning the Big 12 as his Cornhuskers' greatest accomplishment.
For the best don’t always win the CWS. In fact, this century No. 1 never has.
The national No. 1 seed hasn’t won it all since Miami in 1999.
That same 1999 season, retired Hall of Fame Coach Norm DeBriyn’s Razorbacks won the SEC Overall championship but felt their hearts break at regionals.
A stunning Missouri State ninth inning home run left them lifeless to be loser’s bracket, eliminated by Clemson immediately thereafter.
Twenty-two years later vs. North Carolina State, another SEC champion Razorbacks team was skewered on the same late home run petard.
Four DeBriyn-coached teams advanced to Omaha. The 1986 powerhouse Razorbacks led by top Major League draft pick Jeff King and with much of the 1985 CWS Razorbacks may have been the most talented of all.
Yet they didn’t make it to Omaha. Like the 2021 Razorbacks, their hot bats went cold in two regional defeats.
The 1987 Razorbacks, so far less talented that DeBriyn fretted their fall scrimmages against junior colleges, miraculously jelled in the spring. They advanced to Omaha.
It does seem a pity that these Hogs winning the toughest league and ranked No. 1 for so long didn’t advance to the College World Series.
But this is not a team to recall with disappointment.
Better to remember how these Razorbacks winning SEC baseball at Baum-Walker brightened an Arkansas spring started dark with covid.