For the first time this season, Florida isn’t considered the best team in college baseball.
When Monday’s rankings came out, the Gators plummeted from No. 1 to No. 7, an unsurprising landing for a team that has lost five of its last seven games.
“We’ll talk about it,” coach Kevin O’Sullivan said when asked if the drop can motivate his team out of a midseason lull. “If it does help, that’d be great, but we’ll see.”
The Gators will waste no time in trying to prove that they still belong atop the rankings. Tonight at 6, Florida State, the nation’s new No. 1 team, will be waiting at Dick Howser Stadium in Tallahassee. The Gators (25-7) will try to sweep a season series against the Seminoles (27-5) for the first time since 1958.
While that is the big picture of Tuesday night’s game, at its core is a once dominant Florida team searching for answers. Through three weekends of Southeastern Conference play, the Gators have already lost as many conference series as they did all of last season.
During its past seven games, Florida has had its starting pitcher go more than four innings only twice. Even worse, the Gators have allowed an average of seven runs per game in their past five losses, after entering the Ole Miss series allowing 2.7 runs per game.
“The ultimate goal for us is just to stay positive and learn from our mistakes, which there are a lot to learn from,” freshman first baseman Taylor Gushue said.
Despite entering the stretch as one of the top-10 teams in the nation in fielding percentage, the Gators have committed nine errors in seven games, and none of them have come from Vickash Ramjit or Daniel Pigott — the two outfielders whom Florida was concerned about after losing senior center fielder Tyler Thompson to injury.
In fact, Ramjit has been one of the few consistent players for UF during the slide.
As strange as it sounds, a meeting with the nation’s new top team might be a chance for Florida to pull things together. In their previous two games with the Seminoles this season, the Gators have won handily behind dominant pitching.
But the two meetings have been a rarity for FSU, a team that has lost just three games to teams not named Florida this year.
Factor in that the Gators are 30 games below .500 all-time in Tallahassee, and you have a one-night storyline 54 years in the making.
Perpetually at a loss for words the past couple weeks, O’Sullivan was simple when asked what he hopes to see out of his team Tuesday.
“Score more runs than the opposing team. Simple as that. I don’t care what the score is, just score more runs than the opposing team.”
Coach Kevin O’Sullivan talks to his team following a loss to LSU in 2012. Texas A&M knocked off O'Sullivan's Gators 6-3 in the first round of the SEC Tournament on Tuesday in Hoover, Ala.
