No. 10 seed Arkansas is the lone double digit seed into the second weekend of the 2025 NCAA Tournament after stunning No. 2 seed St. John’s. 

The Razorbacks are in the Sweet 16, set to face No. 3 seed Texas Tech in the West Region semifinals on Thursday night in San Francisco, California. The Red Raiders are paced by an elite offense that has Big 12 Player of the Year J.T. Toppin patrolling the rim on both sides of the floor. 

Can Arkansas pull another upset? Or will Texas Tech continue to emerge as a Final Four threat?

Here’s our betting preview. 

Spread

Moneyline

Total: 147.5 (Over -115/Under -105)

Odds courtesy of FanDuel Sportsbook.

Arkansas

DJ Wagner: The Kentucky transfer has given the Razorbacks some on-ball juice in the NCAA Tournament, providing downhill penetration as well as sound shot creation for others as he has 10 assists over the pair of postseason wins. Can Wagner shine again against a formidable Texas Tech defense?

Texas Tech

JT Toppin: The Big 12 Player of the Year has been unstoppable in the NCAA Tournament, averaging more than 18 points per game with nearly 12 rebounds and two blocks. He is an elite finisher around the rim and an imposing threat defending it and cleaning the glass. 

I like Texas Tech to take care of business in the Sweet 16 against an Arkansas team that faced two incredibly limited offenses in the first two rounds. 

The Razorbacks got to the second weekend in close games, two teams that were poor shooting teams, primarily from the perimeter with Kansas ranked 77th in effective field goal percentage and St. John’s ranked 262nd.

Arkansas has been able to lean on its overall talent and pedigree to outlast those teams, but that won’t be the case against a spaced out Texas Tech offense that is 29th in the country in effective field goal percentage. 

Texas Tech is a loaded two-way roster with superior shot making, but also the physicality on the defensive side of the ball around Toppin and veteran forward Darrion Williams that ranks top 100 in the country in defensive rebounding rate. 

The Razorbacks will need to run on the Red Raiders to get easy buckets in transition, but the team is an elite transition denial team and forces teams to operate in the halfcourt, which will shift this game towards the favorite, who is in line to cover the spread.

PICK: Texas Tech -5.5 (-118, Available at FanDuel Sportsbook)

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It’s always a shame when the nation’s great industrial past gets erased, when an old factory or warehouse that would make great a community space gets erased for gigantic generic condos. Well, Bentonville is doing it right. The Northwest Arkansas town has hit it big in developing an adaptive reuse project dubbed The Momentary, a satellite cultural hub of the city’s already celebrated Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

And fortunately, it smells just fine inside, considering that this is a massive former Kraft Foods cheese plant that operated from the postwar era until as recently as 2013. Having opened literally days before the pandemic broke out, The Momentary is hitting its stride now as a big city venue in a smaller-sized city. Its 63,000 square feet are impressive enough, but it’s all about its huge menu of creative ventures in music, art and food. Eat your heart out Brooklyn.

With it lying just south of the Bentonville historic district in this bike mad city, you can follow—pedal- or biped-style—a section of the Razorback Greenway to get there. The Momentary has good neighbors too: Keep going a bit further and you’ll land up at the brand new Walmart campus with ponds and landscaping that looks like something out of a European urban project; you’re also next door to the 8th Street Market, another former food processing plant turned into a food and drinks center, with culinary arts eduction, books and more.

Libations And Other Liquids Top To Bottom

Let’s start at the top where the glass-enclosed Momentary Tower Bar addition will stop you in your tracks as you get off the elevator. You’d swear you’re in a mid-century space and you’ll drool how the floor-to-ceiling windows would make for the ultimate in penthouse apartments. A popular feature is the glass hole in the roof just above a glass hole on the floor that opens all the way to the factory bottom six floors down. It’s not for the vertically challenged as you sit fire pit-style on the semicircular banquette sipping craft cocktails (do try the Umami Mango with reposado tequila).

Down on the ground floor at a branch of Arkansas’s popular Onyx Coffee Lab, look out for the automated conveyor belt for delivery of your caffeine. As any self respecting hipster attracting venue would have, a Momentary Food Truck is parked outside. Local chefs also cook for the monthly Supper Club dinner series.

Credit for reimagining this Momentary village within a city—and its dramatic six-story curtain wall and glass galore—goes to the Chicago firm of Whealer Kearns Architects.

Art And Music Under Many Roofs

The Momentary’s state of the art indoor Røde House music venue is named for the high end audio maker. Its walk-up Røde Bar gives out to the plaza. Outdoors, a huge white Canopy is the stage venue for Live on the Green concerts (see schedule selections at bottom).

There’s still time to catch the delightful exhibit Best in Show: Pets in Contemporary Photography that comes from the Fotografiska Museum New York. Celebrated photographer Elliott Erwitt is among 25 artists shown, while William Wegman appears with his famous weimaraners. A series of goofy dogs taking baths was shot by Sophie Gamand, and an amusing row of photos of dogs and owners who look like one another by Gerrard Gething. You can bring your pooch too (through April 13, 2025).

The show was curated in conjunction with the Best Friends Animal Society whose aim is to end shelter kills. The animal welfare organization’s Pet Resource Center (one of five nationwide) opened in Bentonville last year and welcomes everyone for a visit. Of course, this coffee mad town means there’s a coffee shop inside too. You might just leave with a latte and a Labrador.

All across town, Bentonville’s cultural institutions provide bilingual English/Spanish information panels. The respect extends to Indigenous cultures as well, as in The Momentary’s recent Cherokee Nation Film Showcase in the wonderfully named Fermentation Hall.

Public Art Abounds

The Momentary publicly acknowledges that it lies on the site of Osage hunting grounds. A member of the Osage Nation, artist Addie Roanhorse contributed Sway, an arrow pattern design on the Tower glass and elsewhere.

Neon lives on here with Bahamian conceptual artist Tavares Strachan’s huge red Youbelonghere sculptural signage draped across the Momentary exterior. It’s a gorgeous piece in its calligraphic elegance.

Mounted outdoors, artist Leo Villareal’s homage to Buckminster Fuller, Buckyball, is made up of LED bulbs that change colors around aluminum tubing that sort of soccer ball-like make up one geodesic sphere inside another.

As part of the city’s outdoor OZ Art NWA program, the celebrated Yinka Shonibare’s fiberglass and steel Wind Sculpture (SG) VIII (2022) is a vibrant piece of African cloth that, while in fact static, seems to be caught in the wind. The Nigerian British artist’s work evokes African heritage over centuries of colonization.

With so much going on at The Momentary, you’re gonna wanna take your time.

A selection of upcoming art and music events at The Momentary includes:

-The Prison Concerts: Folsom and San Quentin feature Johnny Cash images by photographer Jim Marshall in the exhibition galleries, May 24–Oct 12.

-Live on the Green: GloRilla, June 13; Alabama Shakes, July 22; Ziggy Marley & Burning Spear, October 3.

RØDE House: The Main Squeeze, March 28; Shemekia Copeland, July 26.

FreshGrass|Bentonville: Billed as “an all-ages American and global roots music festival” will include Béla Fleck and Rosanne Cash with John Leventhal, May 16-17.

Read also this story on the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Fourteen grants to the Arkansas health and human services departments have been listed for termination, potentially saving the federal government over $165 million, according to an update to the Department of Government Efficiency’s website.

The Arkansas grant terminations were listed Sunday on the “Wall of Receipts” website, along with terminations nationwide of grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

The DOGE website didn’t explain what the grants were for, listing “No description available” on each of the website entries.

The list of terminations includes 11 grants to the Arkansas Department of Health totalling $158 million.

“The referenced funding was supplemental funding in immunizations, health disparities, and epidemiology and laboratory capacity funding,” said Meg Mirivel, a spokesperson for the Arkansas Department of Health. “We always understood these were temporary grants. The ADH is adjusting accordingly and is well equipped to serve Arkansans.”

The Arkansas health department received $367 million in federal funding in fiscal 2022, the most recent year for which numbers were available late Tuesday. The department received $534 million that year from all sources, including $58 million in general revenue.

When asked if the grants had been terminated already and whether any layoffs would occur as a result, Mirivel said she was working to get answers but probably wouldn’t be able to do so late Tuesday.

The list also included three grants to the Arkansas Department of Human Services totalling $7.6 million.

“The Arkansas Department of Human Services has received notice that federal funds that supported temporary COVID activities through the American Rescue Plan Act have been or may be canceled effective March 24, 2025,” said Gavin Lesnick, a spokesman for the Arkansas department. “We have confirmed that the Substance Abuse Prevention and Treatment Block Grant has been canceled. We are seeking clarification from our federal partners as to other impacted (Arkansas Rescue Plan) grants and remain committed to serving Arkansans through the resources we have available.”

The update on Sunday also listed the termination of a $5 million U.S. Department of Defense grant to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock.

Carrie Phillips, a spokesperson for the university, said the grant was awarded in 2023 and was for “Developing socio-computational capabilities to evaluate emerging social cyber threats,” citing a document pertaining to the grant.

The grant had an unspent balance of $2.8 million — $1.6 million of which was for a “sub-awardee,” Cambridge Semantics Inc., said Phillips. The grant’s scheduled end date was Feb. 28, 2026.

More information about that grant award can be found on this website.

NBC News reported on Tuesday that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is pulling back $11.4 billion in funds allocated in response to the pandemic to state and community health departments, non-government organizations and international recipients.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services oversees the center, as well as a dozen other agencies.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago,” said Andrew Nixon, a spokesman for the department, in a statement to the television network. “HHS is prioritizing funding projects that will deliver on President Trump’s mandate to address our chronic disease epidemic and Make America Healthy Again.”

Notices began going out Monday, and awardees have 30 days to reconcile their expenditures, according to NBC.