No. 8 Florida State ended No. 14 Stanford’s run through the ACC Championship tournament with a 9-0 win in the semifinal, scoring early and often before ending it by run-rule in the fifth inning. Stanford’s season record fell to 37-13 as the Cardinal were sent to wait for Sunday’s NCAA Tournament selection show.
Florida State put three runs on the board in the bottom of the first inning, two of them earned, then added two more in the second and four in the bottom of the fourth to take full control. The fifth-inning finish turned what had started as a semifinal into a short night for Stanford and snapped the Cardinal’s 15-game winning streak.
The loss matters because it removed Stanford from the ACC Championship and left the Cardinal with nothing left to play for this week except the bracket reveal. Stanford will learn its postseason fate on Sunday at 4:00 p.m. PT when the NCAA Tournament field is unveiled on ESPN2.
For Stanford, the sharpest problem was not just the final score but how quickly Florida State made the game unreachable. By the time the Seminoles scored again in the second and then broke it open with four more in the fourth, the semifinal had already shifted from competitive to procedural. The result gave Stanford no chance to answer before the run-rule ended it in the fifth.
That leaves the Cardinal in a waiting game after a loss that undercut both momentum and margin. Their place in the NCAA Tournament will be decided Sunday, but the final image from the ACC semifinal is the one that will linger: Florida State scoring at will, Stanford still scoreless, and a season’s last conference test over before it had fully begun.
