Gator Sports: Thoughts of the Day

June 22, 2023

A few thoughts to jump start your Thursday morning:

Florida Gators 14, Everybody Else 11. That’s the combined score of Florida’s three games in Omaha. The Gators beat Virginia, 6-5; Oral Roberts, 5-4; and TCU 3-2. Three games, three wins and a ticket punched to the best-of-three championship series with the winner of tonight’s loser goes home game between top-seeded Wake Forest and LSU.

Back when the Gators were majoring in Gorilla Ball, when folks seemed disappointed any time fewer than 10 runs crossed the plate, nobody foresaw a time when Florida wins depended more on stout pitching and near flawless defense. Even past midseason some of the experts were doubting the Gators could go very far in the NCAA Tournament because there would come a time when UF could no longer rely on winning games in home run derby fashion.

That was then. This is now.

“It's not easy to get to this point,” Florida coach Kevin O’Sullivan said after the Gators eliminated TCU Wednesday afternoon. “It's just not. I know I overstate it and say it over and over, but we just played three one-run games and they're all nail-biters down to the end. There's a lot of things that have to go right.”

Things do have to go right. While Florida’s home run pace has slowed down in Omaha because the wind knocks down so many potential home runs, it really isn’t about how many homers the Gators have hit, but when they hit them. The Gators hit three in the last two innings in the win over Virginia. They hit three more to stake UF to a lead they never gave up in the win over ORU. Monday, Josh Rivera muscled up a laser shot that cut through the wind and landed in the left field seats of Charles Schwab Field to give the Gators a 2-0 lead in the first inning. Striking that first blow was important. TCU spent plenty of energy playing catchup the rest of the way while the Gators still had the mojo going in the top of the ninth when they scored the winning run without a longball.

Of the 18 homers that have been hit in Omaha, seven were struck by Gators. It has been a case of just enough power combined with dominating pitching, exceptional defense and a skipper who, despite his counting faux paus Monday night in the win over Oral Roberts, seems to have a sixth sense about when to make the right move. Eleven of Florida’s 14 runs have been the direct result of Dr. Longball. Florida’s three starting pitchers have allowed only 15 hits and five runs while striking out 23 batters in 16-2/3 innings. The bullpen has made just enough tough pitches under difficult circumstances to snuff out anything close to a big rally. As for defense, the Gators have committed just one error in 27 innings.

Wednesday, Caglianone gave up only three hits and one run in a 4-1/3 inning start. Ryan Slater pitched the Gators out of a fifth inning jam in his 1-2/3 innings. Cade Fisher pitched a flawless seventh before he was lifted with one out in the eighth. Brandon Neely gave up a run in the eighth after taking over for Fisher, but he gave UF a 1-2-3 inning in the ninth to preserve Florida’s win.

“He [Caglianone] made pitches when he need to, and he'll probably say otherwise, but at the end of the day he bent but didn't break if that makes any sense,” O’Sullivan said. “He made some big pitches, and I think Ryan Slater coming in and recording five outs is huge. We didn't have to go to Cade as early as we possibly wanted to and Brandon did his thing at the end.”

O’Sullivan was brilliant the way he manipulated the Florida pitching, but he has been making all the right moves throughout the postseason. He hasn’t gotten nearly enough credit for the way he’s handled the pitching and made the right moves with his lineup because way too much criticism has been hurled his way because of a counting mistake Monday night against ORU. Neely was forced to leave the game with ORU in the eighth because there had been too many visits to the mound (NCAA rules allow only six; pitcher has to leave the game any time there is a mound visit after the sixth).

Sully joked about it Wednesday, wearing a T-shirt that read, “Yes, I can count to 6” while the Gators took batting practice. Sully did the right thing by falling on the sword and accepting full responsibility for the mistake, but was he actually to blame? If you watch the Florida bench during games, several people are charting every single pitch, swing, defensive play and mistake. Someone on that Florida bench was in charge of charting mound visits. Either that person failed to alert Sully or else Sully paid no attention when he went to the mound in the eighth inning against Oral Roberts. Bet the farm that someone whose responsibility was to chart mound visits blew it, but you’d never know by Sully’s demeanor.

Successful coaches shoulder all the blame for mistakes even when someone else goofed. By pointing only fingers at himself, the level of respect for O’Sullivan in the UF dugout had to grow by epic proportions.

Other than that one mistake, which he owned but most likely belonged to one of his underlings, O’Sullivan has been brilliant when it comes to making all the right moves. Some fans tried to roast O’Sullivan in the twitterverse and on the message boards when TCU tied the game in the bottom of the eighth when TCU tied the game at 2-2. Wyatt Langford missed running down a fly ball to left center that turned into a run-scoring double. One instant message read, “It’s Sully’s fault if we lose because he had Wyatt Langford in center field in the eighth inning. Should have been Michael Robertson.”

Langford missed gloving Anthony Silva’s RBI double by a couple of inches at best. Robertson is the fastest guy on the team, but there are no guarantees he would have gotten a better break on the ball than Langford. So why was Langford still in center? It had everything to do with the batting order. Luke Heyman made the third out in the eighth. Had Sully put Robertson in the game as a defensive replacement, Langford would have moved to left field and Tyler Shelnut’s night would have been over. Shelnut, who already had one hit in the game, was the first batter due up for Florida in the ninth, so Sully wasn’t about to take Shelnut’s bat out of the game in favor of Robertson, who is hitting .232.

Leading off the top of the ninth, Shelnut nearly parked a Ben Abelt fast ball, missing a home run by perhaps a couple of feet. Still, this one was beyond the reach of Austin Davis in right field. Shelnut would up on second with a double. That’s when Robertson came into the game as a pinch-runner. He had the speed to make it to third on Colby Halter’s long fly ball that was the second out of the inning, and he scored the winning run on Cade Kurland’s infield single.

Nobody in the twitterverse seemed to recall that an eighth-inning decision to leave Shelnut in the game paid off, nor did they mention that Robertson had the speed to tag up and still advance to third when Halter missed a home run by less than a foot. What they did notice was Robertson’s leaping grab at the center field fence for the final out that preserved Florida’s win. Folks should also be paying attention to the defense being played on the left side of the infield by Halter at third and Rivera at shortstop.

It's rare that wins are accidental. Sure, accidental wins happen, but more often than not they are the result of a whole slew of things cobbled together at just the right time. Through the first three games of the College World Series, the Gators have been the antithesis of Murphy’s law that goes, “Everything that can go wrong, will go wrong and at the worst possible time.” The Gators are 3-0 and in the championship series because nearly everything that can go right has gone right and it has all happened at the most opportune moment.

The Gators still have two more wins to go before they can claim the school’s first NCAA baseball championship since the 2017 team pulled it off. Some may look at three close call wins as sheer luck or purely accidental, but you don’t win high pressure baseball games if you don’t make all the right moves at just the right time. What these first three wins should be telling us is that this is a team that handles pressure ever so well. Whether it’s Wake Forest or LSU the Gators face in the championship series, this Florida team doesn’t seem capable of letting the circumstances of the big stage get to them.

ESPN’s top 25 predictions next three years: The usual suspects

ESPN must be scrounging around for content when it comes to college football because it has resorted to predicting college football’s top 25 teams for the next three years. Well, here they are in case you are interested: 1. Georgia; 2. Alabama; 3. Ohio State; 4. Michigan; 5. LSU; 6. Southern Cal; 7. Clemson; 8. Penn State; 9. Tennessee; 10. Florida State; 11. Oregon; 12. Oklahoma; 13. Utah; 14. Notre Dame; 15. Texas; 16. Washington; 17. TCU; 18. Kansas State; 19. Wisconsin; 20. Iowa; 21. Oregon State; 22. South Carolina; 23. UCLA; 24. Pittsburgh; 25. Ole Miss.

Here are a few predictions of my own: (1) Tennessee won’t be a top 25 program in three years; (2) Florida State won’t be in the top 25 in part because Mike Norvell won’t hang around at a program that will be making about half what Florida makes in media money; (3) Southern Cal and UCLA will struggle when they have to play cold weather games in the Big Ten so they’re going to lose quite a few games; (4) Texas will be a top five team or better because Arch Manning will be that good; (5) Billy Napier will bring in the kind of recruiting classes that will put the Gators in championship contention sooner and not later.

ONE FINAL PITHY THOUGHT: By winning their Wednesday matchup with TCU, the Florida Gators are assured of no less than a second place finish at the College World Series. A win against either Wake Forest or LSU, whichever one emerges from tonight’s do or die matchup, will give the Florida athletic program three national championships since May 1, perhaps the hottest finish any SEC school has ever had.

Florida has national championships already in men’s golf and men’s track and field, plus a second place finish in women’s track. Add in other programs that provided points and the Florida athletic program will have scored a remarkable 600 points in the spring. A baseball national championship will give UF 700 spring points

Take a moment to digest this: Florida has won national championships in 16 sports. The closest any SEC team can come to that record is Georgia, which has national titles in 10 different sports.

Florida will finish fifth in the Director’s Cup standings, just four points behind fourth place Virginia, and this is without any points from football, men’s or women’s basketball or soccer. Based on what Billy Napier is doing with football recruiting and how Todd Golden is bringing in outstanding talent for basketball, Florida will be an athletic program that consistently finishes top two or three in the Director’s Cup, and has a chance to win one even without sports like water polo, fencing and field hockey, which add to the final totals of certain west coast and some of the east coast schools.