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Looks like we had another "Lovelady" regular season.........

This is a long post...

It's actually not a terrible conference. Just a lot of equal talent across and if you have your top two pitchers go down with 6 weeks left, the finish to season will be uneven. Remember, they played UNCG, Georgia Southern, Ole Miss, Miami, and FSU in non-conference and that is 5 NCAA tournament teams. Yes, they blew a couple early to some weaker teams and that can't happen in the bullpen so work is needed there.

One thing to note that college baseball is old, in terms of age, and UCF had three freshmen starting in the lineup. All three hit .325 or better in conference play. And we had pitching go down after 2nd weekend. They probably have three of the best freshmen position players in the league who are young and will be around in Boedicker, Brooks and Sundean. Boedicker and Sundean were pretty consistent, although they both struggled the last 3-4 weeks of season. If you look at the last 30 games, Brooks hit .340 with 24 RBI and led team in walks. Very unusual for a college freshman to do that with the older players in college now and he's probably the best defensive 3B in the league. Ask some of the fans at the games and even players. They will tell you he's a dude and is going to be one of the best at UCF, he's just young. When the rules go back to 35 man roster next year and some of these power teams have to lose players, it will be nice to have 3 really strong freshmen. For crying out loud, the Brooks kid is headed to the Cape for the last month of summer after the draft and that is decided by scouts.

Now, you have those young bucks back and also McCabe, Josten, Romano, and Freeland (maybe, if he doesn't decide to take money on draft day since he's 21). That's 6, maybe 7 of 9 of the lineup back on a team that led the league in hitting. What is needed is pitching depth and maybe a look at how pitchers are being worked. To have 7 arm injuries on a staff is really high. Something fishy is happening there, but who knows what that is. So they need to go heavy into portal for about 3 arms (two starters and a legit closer) so that they can have more pitching depth. The fact that they won 35 games with 4 freshmen pitchers in bullpen, who were not even expected to throw 4-5 innings all year, is actually pretty amazing. Also, think about this, they blew 4-5 games early in year by blowing games at the end in the bullpen. This could easily have been a 39-40 win team. So it's not as far away as you think and they should absolutely load up on non-conference schedule next year with all the offensive experience coming back. if you watched the selection show today, non-conference schedule was the biggest point of discussion from committee. You can't control who is in your conference, but you can control the other 30 games you play and if you schedule up, you get rewarded as long as you play well in conference. But you do have to beat the teams you are supposed to like North Florida, Jacksonville, Bethune, FAMU etc and then split with FSU and Miami in mid week games.
 
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