Mike Bianchi: Gators, SEC may spend FSU, ACC into oblivion.
Gators and fat-cat SEC could spend FSU, ACC into oblivion
COLLEGE SPORTS
day, another national championship for the Florida Gators. Yawn. This time, it was the baseball team. A couple of weeks ago, it was the dynastic track-and-field team. A couple of weeks before that, it was women’s tennis team. Since 2010, the Gators have won 17 national championships in a
Florida savors first baseball national title. C3
multitude of sports.
Beware, Florida State. It’s only a matter of time before UF’s football team is paying, er, playing for national championships, too. Ditto, the basketball team.
You see, nobody in this part of the country buys, er, wins naAnother tional championships like UF does.
This column is not meant so much to prop up the Gators for being an all-sports giant, although they certainly are. After coach Kevin O’Sullivan’s baseball team beat LSU 6-1 to win UF’s first College World Series cham-
OMAHA, Neb. — Florida’s first baseball championship ended with a mystery.
After catching the final out of the Gators’ 6-1 win against Louisiana State on Tuesday night, JJ Schwarz tucked the ball in his glove and tossed both aside for the traditional mid-field dog pile. When he returned to the glove, the ball was gone.
“Whoever took Tom Brady’s jersey took that ball,” Schwarz said.
The search was still on when the Gators boarded their team bus shortly after midnight outside of TD Ameritrade Park — the Gators’ happy home the past two weeks.
The concerns were much greater early in the championship season, one that saw a struggling offense and surprising losses. Jacksonville beat the Gators, then Florida Gulf Coast swept a twogame series, and later Auburn won all three against Florida on the opening weekend of Southeastern Conference play.
“The Auburn series, that was a difficult one,” coach Kevin O’Sullivan said after the championship victory.
But the following weekend, Florida won two-ofthree against LSU.
“Maybe our team started believing a little bit,” O’Sullivan said.
There was a slight regression in early April when Tennessee won a pair of 10-inning games in Gainesville, but from that point Florida went 16-3 in the SEC to share the league title with LSU. The wins often weren’t pretty. Florida came to Omaha hitting .262 — the lowest batting average of O’Sullivan’s 10-year tenure. But great pitching from starters like Jackson Kowar — who closed Tuesday’s title-clincher — Brady Singer and Alex Faedo and the emergence of closer Michael Byrne enabled the Gators to go 19-7 in one-run games.
“That guy has been the hero this year,” Kowar said of Byrne.
Byrne set a school record with 19 saves. He’d hoped for a 20th on Tuesday, but he was pulled in the eighth inning. Instead he was put in charge of taking the wood-and-glass national championship trophy off the field.
“Nobody else wanted to hold it,” Byrne said. “It’s pretty heavy, but I wouldn’t want to be holding anything else.”
Byrne came on for freshman Tyler Dyson, who gave up one run in six innings in his second start. Dyson showed command of his fastball and of understatement.
“I think this start went a little better than my first one,” Dyson said, referencing a 12⁄3 innings start against Florida State.
Dyson could take the spot of Faedo, the Most Outstanding Player of the CWS who will move onto professional ball after being drafted in the first round by the Detroit Tigers.
“He’s our future,” catcher Mike Rivera said of Dyson. “If you didn’t know, now you know.”
Sophomore Singer — whom LSU coach Paul Mainieri said might be the best SEC pitcher he’d seen — will return along with Kowar, a sophomore.
“I think Florida baseball is in great shape,” O’Sullivan said. “In this business you get to enjoy this for a little bit … as soon as we get back home you have exit meetings with your players and some guys are going off into pro ball, some kids are going off into summer ball, and there’s scholarship stuff that needs to be in by July 1, and you’ve got to figure out the draft; who is staying and who is going.”
That’s a lot to do, but O’Sullivan need not worry about that missing ball. Rivera has a solution.
“We can make one up,” Rivera said.