Kevin O’Sullivan somehow topped Todd Golden’s disastrous Sunday

We interrupt the postmortem on Florida’s basketball season to check in with Gator Baseball. Last time we had touched on Florida, they shook off the series loss to High Point to beat FSU, sweep South Carolina, and pick up a midweek win against Stetson. All told, Florida came into its series against Alabama on a six-game winning streak and was looking for another series win to keep the momentum going before the schedule ramps up.

Instead, the ghosts of 2025 returned in a heartbeat for Florida, and all of a sudden, the Gators are unranked once again after getting swept by the Crimson Tide.

Florida gets swept by Alabama

There is no defending what happened this weekend for the Gators. While most fans on Friday were paying attention to Florida Basketball lay the smackdown on Prairie View A&M, Florida Baseball collected zero hits against Alabama.

Zero.

And it’s not like it was against some future first-round pick, as Alabama pitcher Tyler Fay had given up seven runs in his previous start to Kentucky. Florida struck out 13 times while walking just twice en route to a 6-0 loss.

On Saturday, Aidan King wasn’t completely sharp and gave up four runs in five innings of work. The bullpen then proceeded to give up four more runs as Florida lost 8-4.

Sunday seemed to be the day that broke O’Sullivan as Florida’s bats actually had a good day, and Florida took an early 4-0 lead, and it was still 4-2 heading into the bottom of the 6th.

Seven runs later by Alabama, and O’Sullivan looked like a broken man. Nine walks and two more batters hit by a pitch will do that to you.

After the game three loss to complete the sweep, O’Sullivan commented that he wasn’t pleased with Florida’s approach in game one and felt they had far too many non-competitive at-bats. He then commented on the energy and the vibes in Florida’s dugout simply weren’t good:

“The other thing is, Liam (Peterson) comes up to me before the game and wants to give the team a speech to talk about the energy in the dugout. And I thought our energy was pretty darn good until they tied the game. And then all of a sudden, it took all of the air out of the dugout.”

The concerning part is that once again, O’Sullivan is having to comment on the energy level of the Gators. Last year, O’Sullivan made similar comments about a “lack of leadership” on the team, and it showed during Florida’s 1-11 start to SEC play. And while the Gators closed the season on a hot streak, the lack of baseball IQ reared its ugly head once Florida got to the NCAA Tournament.

Those deja vu vibes are back in full effect. Yes, part of the issue is that Florida’s NIL budget for baseball lags well behind that of the big boys in the SEC. 

But NIL has nothing to do with the motivation of a player and has nothing to do with executing basic baseball plays. Florida had four more errors over the course of the weekend.

And, fair or not, the whispers about whether O’Sullivan still has it will keep growing if this season goes south. We all remember his CWS runs in 2023 and 2024, but if we pull back a little further, Florida has only hosted a regional AND advanced once since 2019 (2023). The 2024 season was litteraly saved by the CWS run as Florida was one loss away in the regular season from not even making the tournament. 

Unless Florida has a massive turnaround, this year would mark the sixth of the last seven seasons in which Florida didn’t finish in the top 16 in the regular season AND didn't advance to Super Regionals.

Currently, Florida is unranked.

We have seen this song and dance before, where Florida has a midseason slump only to figure it out, and O’Sullivan is going to keep pressing buttons until there are no more buttons to press.

But for at least one inning in Alabama, O’Sullivan looked as lost as the rest of us watching the Gators.