The Florida Gators are not the highest seed left in the NCAA Tournament field.

That would be top overall seed Wake Forest.

The Demon Deacons, however, haven’t been tested like Florida, the SEC champion and No. 2 overall seed. The Gators (45-14), despite having 4 more losses than Wake Forest, are the best team still playing in the NCAA Tournament field.

The proof is in the star power, depth and stat lines.

Florida has the best 1-2-3 pitching combination, with the trio of Brandon Sproat, Hurston Waldrep and Golden Spikes Award finalist Jac Caglianone going a combined 22-9 with a collective opponent batting average against of .204, the best of any weekend rotation still playing. Bullpen? The Gators have a great one, with an elite setup man in Cade Fisher, who oh by the way just tossed 7 innings of 1-run baseball in an emergency start to save Florida’s season in the regional against Texas Tech. And Florida has a dominant closer in First Team All-SEC reliever Brandon Neely, who has 12 saves and 61 strikeouts over 44 innings pitched.

Thunderous offense? Check. Florida has tremendous power, with their 126 home runs first in the country among teams remaining in the field, and Caglianone’s 31 bombs the nation’s most by any individual player. The Gators also rank 2nd nationally, behind only LSU, in slugging percentage and .OPS among teams still playing.

High-end talent? Florida has that in spades. All-American Wyatt Langford will be 1 of the top 3 picks in the Major League Baseball draft next month, and is “the closest thing to Mike Trout (5 tools, with a “plus” grade in all of them) we have seen in college baseball, I think,” according to Vanderbilt head coach Tim Corbin, who knows a thing or two about coaching big-league talent.

Outside of Dylan Crews, Langford be the best player still playing this weekend.

Caglianone isn’t draft eligible, but he may win the Golden Spikes Award, unless media members universally flock to LSU star Dylan Crews instead of his teammate and fellow finalist Paul Skenes (both deserved finalists and potential winners) when they vote this month. Sproat and Waldrep are projected to be selected in the first 2 rounds of the amateur draft, and along with Langford, they make Florida the only team in the field with 3 players in Major League baseball’s current top 25 prospect list. 

Put plainly, Florida is loaded, and as good as Wake Forest, LSU and Stanford are, the Gators are the best team still playing.

The lone question is whether Florida can put all that talent together for 3 more weeks to help the program capture its 2nd College World Series crown.

Opportunities to win it all don’t come around often, even at a place with as much historic success as Florida.

This is Florida’s 11th trip to the Super Regionals, the 5th-most among programs remaining in the field (LSU has been to a staggering 16, South Carolina, Texas, and Stanford have played in 14). It is Florida’s first Super Regional since 2018, however.

O’Sullivan called the journey back to this weekend, where the Gators will host No. 15 seed South Carolina at Condron Family Ballpark, “humbling.”

“When you are in the middle of a stretch like we were in (7 College World Series trips in 11 years), you don’t really appreciate how difficult it is. Now, stepping back and we haven’t gone since 2018. That makes you appreciate it and go ‘wow, what an awesome stretch.’ To get back to this point, that’s pretty important for our program. I don’t know if our program was off track, but we expect excellence, we expect to go to Omaha, and when you haven’t been and haven’t had the opportunity for a few years, it’s hard to get the excellence back. So we appreciate where we are.”

Of course, where Florida is at this point isn’t where they hope to be or are talented enough to be — which is in Omaha with a chance to finish the season with a dogpile. If that happens, Florida would become the first program to win multiple national championships in football, men’s basketball and baseball.

The Gators are also all too familiar with just how good a baseball team South Carolina will bring to Gainesville this weekend, as O’Sullivan was quick to remind the media this week.

“South Carolina is a heck of a ballclub and it will be a heck of a series. We have our work cut out for us.”

In fact, the Gators are the seed most likely to be upset, according to Vegas oddsmakers and statistical win probability based on matchups and metrics.

A national power in its own right, South Carolina is never intimidated. The Gamecocks also know they can beat Florida, having dominated the Gators in a 3-game sweep in Columbia in April. Florida, meanwhile, has won 7 consecutive Super Regionals, with their last defeat coming in 2009 when they fell at home to Southern Miss.

“I realize how difficult it is to be here, and I’m proud of this team and the way they work and their heart,” O’Sullivan reflected this week. “But we have work to do.”

Florida’s work, if they play to their talent level and ability, should be enough to propel them to Omaha, where a chance to win a second national championship would await.

There’s no guarantee that chance presents itself again in the near future, either.

O’Sullivan has long been the nation’s best recruiter, but even with his chops for identifying talents like Fisher, the freshman sensation from tiny Dalton, Georgia, who rescued the Gators in their time of need last weekend, it will be brutally hard for Florida to replace the likes of Langford, Sproat, Waldrep and do-everything shortstop Josh Rivera next season.

Will that increase this team’s sense of urgency? Did being pushed to the brink of elimination, and becoming just 1 of 7 teams since the 2018 NCAA Tournament to win 3 or 4 games in a row to capture a regional and advance, give the Gators momentum they can ride to Omaha?

We’ll find out starting Friday night, when the Gators may simply be as good as their starting pitcher.

Or the Gators may show up and play like who metrics and talent evaluators say they are: the best team left playing. The team that not only should win this weekend against the Gamecocks, but should win the whole thing when the games move to Omaha.