The Florida Gators are in great position for the NCAA Tournament after crushing #12 Auburn. (Photo via Florida Gators)
After a week off, Todd Golden didn’t have to wait long to see how his Florida Gators would respond after a devastating 67-66 loss to Texas A&M. To be precise: he needed twenty seconds.
Walter Clayton buried a three to open the scoring with 19:40 showing on the clock and the Florida Gators never looked back, leading wire-to-wire in an 81-65 throttling of Bruce Pearl’s Auburn Tigers. It’s the Gators’ 15th straight win over Auburn in the O’Connell Center, dating all the way back to 1996. It’s also Florida’s fifth win in its last six games, adjusting their record upward to 16-7, and 6-4 in the SEC.
Most importantly, it’s Florida’s second Quad 1 win– an important metric that the NCAA Selection Committee uses when filling out its field of 68 for the NCAA Tournament. The Gators also took down Kentucky in Rupp Arena late last month.
Additionally, Florida’s own NET ranking vaulted skyward because of the victory. Coming into the day, the Florida Gators sat at 38; that number spiked up to 31 as a result of the beatdown of Auburn. Traditionally, teams in the top 40 of the NET are thought to be safe to receive a bid, and teams in the top 35 are generally considered to be locks.
Of course, there’s still a month of basketball to be played for this Florida team. But if they look anything like the team we saw on Saturday over this next month, it’s little more than a formality.
Riley Kugel dominated this game, dropping 22 points and pulling down four rebounds. He was aided by Zyon Pullin (19 points, three assists, and six rebounds) and Walter Clayton (20 points and six assists). Micah Handlogten, for his part, only chipped in four points, but contributed in other ways. The big man hauled in nine rebounds, blocked five shots, and perfectly deflected an inbounds pass to teammate Will Richard, who threaded the needle to Riley Kugel on the breakaway for the monster jam.
At no point did it objectively seem that Auburn had a prayer in this one. The Gators opened on a 9-0 run out of the gates, quickly expanded that lead to 26-9, and cruised to the intermission period with a 42-26 lead. In contrast to the Gators’ near meltdown against Georgia a few weeks ago, Florida simply poured it on in the second half. The lead exploded to 64-35 six minutes into the second half, at which juncture Golden decided his old boss had had enough. Florida had made its point.
The Gators really couldn’t do much wrong on this afternoon. Florida drained seven threes, outrebounded a big Auburn team 43-41, rejected seven shots, and forced fifteen turnovers. Florida even helped its cause at the free throw line, going 20-26 from the stripe– a nice sign after some early struggles there this season.
And now the schedule gets much, much easier. Up this week for the Gators are a 12-11 LSU team that’s barely in the top 100 of the NET rankings and a road rematch with Mike White and a Georgia team that’s now lost five straight games. A tough game against a ranked Alabama squad on the road awaits next to break up the monotony of bad opponents, but then the Gators finish February by hosting a pair of historically incompetent teams: a 6-17 Vanderbilt squad with a NET ranking of 237, and an 8-16 Missouri squad in those NET rankings.
Florida will then finish its regular season with a triad of games in March: at South Carolina, home against Alabama, and at Vanderbilt. But while that’s a tough stretch to finish the year, Todd Golden’s Gators have a chance here to stack some wins and finalize their NCAA Tournament resume before that stretch of games in March even begins. Win four of these next five games, and Florida hits the 20-win benchmark, which for SEC teams has traditionally been the point of being “unsnubbable.”
In other words, winning 20 games before Selection Sunday as an SEC basketball team– especially with the league being as strong as it is now– has historically been a sure ticket to the NCAA Tournament, and the path to that accomplishment is now as clear and free as it’s been in a long time.
