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O’Gara: 28 losses or not, Florida forgot how to lose and is now the ultimate wild card in Omaha
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After I picked my jaw up off the floor and mansplained to my wife why we had just watched one of the best catches we’ll ever see, I declared.
Well, Clemson can’t lose now.
Cam Cannarella’s Willie Mays-like, jumping, over-the-shoulder catch without a warning track had major “team of destiny” vibes. It was the type of play that gets slow-motion treatment with 10 different talking heads recapping their vantage point for the championship DVD (do they still make those?). To save the game like that … no. To save the season in extra innings while facing elimination in a Super Regional like that was the stuff of legend. Never mind the fact that he had a game-tying 3-run homer in the 9th to force extras.
Clemson wasn’t going to lose. No way. Florida was cooked in Game 2, and perhaps in Game 3, too.
Yet somehow, the Gators were anything but cooked. They still had life. That’s been the mantra for the last 3 weeks. On the heels of that blown lead and Cannarella’s for-the-ages grab — as well as a Clemson home run in the top of the 13th that prompted a coach ejection because umpires were upset about a bat spike — Florida did what Florida does. It found a way and moved on.
It’s hard to process how the team with 28 losses is heading to Omaha as the team that has seemingly forgotten how to lose. The 11th SEC team to make the NCAA Tournament has gone from being a hot-button topic about power conferences getting the benefit of the doubt to being the ultimate wild card in Omaha. It wasn’t that long ago that the Gators “didn’t belong” and that their NCAA Tournament invite was entirely the byproduct of wanting 2-way superstar Jac Caglianone to get into the field.
Yeah, about that.
If Florida wins a national title, it’ll be straight out of the 2022 Ole Miss playbook. That squad was the last team in the NCAA Tournament field. It got the benefit of the doubt for its SEC schedule, despite the frustration that outsiders had about the 33-22 overall record and the sub-.500 record in SEC play.
Related: Looking to stay on top of all the College World Series action? SDS has you covered with its CWS homepage!
You could argue that Florida’s path was even more improbable. It had to earn a series win on the road against eventual national seed Georgia just to be eligible for the NCAA Tournament. Including the 3 wins it took to get out of the Oklahoma State Regional with consecutive victories against the host Cowboys, you could say the Gators won 5 elimination games to get to this point.
The Gators didn’t face elimination at Clemson, though. They just faced an overwhelming reality that they could have to get off the mat for a potential Game 3 if they were on the wrong end of an instant classic Game 2.
Yeah, about that.
This won’t be considered a Cinderella run like Ole Miss, who had never won the College World Series. A program with 4 trips to the CWS final in the 21st century like Florida is hardly an underdog in the public eye. The second Caglianone walks off the bus, nobody should assume that Florida is at any sort of disadvantage (his Golden Spikes snub might’ve made all future Florida foes the disadvantaged ones).
It’s worth noting that while Kevin O’Sullivan’s squad oozes with talent, it still hasn’t really found an ace on the mound. True freshman Liam Peterson was the hottest pitcher on the staff entering the postseason, which was why he got the ball for the start of both the Regional and Super Regional, albeit with mixed results. More recently, he recorded just 3 outs and faced 10 batters against Clemson, which put Florida in an early Game 1 hole in the Super Regional.
Florida’s pitching has been more about just piecing things together. It probably wasn’t the plan for closer Brandon Neely to step in and pitch 4 innings in consecutive days, but with an Omaha berth on the line, O’Sullivan squeezed everything he could out of the hot hand.
How about Brandon Neely this postseason?
272 pitches in two weekends.
vs Nebraska – 37 pitches
vs OK State – 104 pitches
vs Clemson — 59 pitches
vs Clemson — 72 pitches pic.twitter.com/WiffPobkCo— Nick de la Torre (@delatorre) June 10, 2024
Yep, that’ll play. More of that would be a godsend for the Florida pitching staff.
Of course, you don’t go 6-1 to start the NCAA Tournament without a bit of timely hitting. That goes double when it comes from the bottom of the order, like when No. 9 hitter Michael Robertson delivered the walk-off 2-RBI double to punch the ticket to Omaha. It also helps that Colby Shelton, Ashton Wilson and Caglianone have done plenty of heavy lifting in the postseason. In the NCAA Tournament, that trio hit .349 with 8 home runs and 29 RBIs.
One would think that any chance that Florida has at getting back to the College World Series final will include the meat of the order continuing to produce at a high level. It’ll begin that journey with a Texas A&M squad that ranks No. 6 in Division I with a 3.94 ERA.
Much has changed since mid-March when those teams faced off in the first series of SEC play. Little did we know the grind that conference play would be for the defending runners-up. Perhaps the SEC grind got Florida through an uphill climb the last few weeks, but in a field that’s loaded with SEC competition, that’s no longer the Gators’ ace in the hole.
Then again, Florida showed that it didn’t need some magic formula. It just needed an opportunity.
The Gators have looked like a team playing with house money for weeks. It’ll take more than the right mindset to be the last team standing in Omaha, but it certainly helps.
At this point, all we know is that jaws shouldn’t need to be picked up off the floor if Florida closes this out.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
