(Photo via Florida Gators)
After a two-year absence from the NCAA Tournament, the Florida Gators are finally going back to the Dance.
To the surprise of some, Florida received a #7 seed despite a run to the SEC Tournament Championship Game, where they lost to Auburn– and also lost starting center Micah Handlogten to an ugly fractured ankle. But even despite being dropped to a #7 seed– many bracketologists had Florida either as a #5 or #6– the #7 seed Florida received isn’t a bad thing. (OG readers of In All Kinds Of Weather: sound familiar?)
Todd Golden’s team is being shipped up north to Indianapolis, where the Gators– with a fanbase that’s notoriously bad at traveling for big events– will be the road team in a pod that also includes Marquette. That’s the bad news.
However, a lot of things do work out nicely for Florida. For one thing, Florida’s opening-round opponent will have just played a game some 40 hours prior in Dayton, a two-hour drive away from Indy. For another, the #2 seed Marquette doesn’t rebound especially well and now is banged up to boot.
Let’s get into each of Florida’s possible opponents in more detail.
Boise State
The Broncos are likely to be the team to suffer more from the long week they’d face should they advance. They’re not an especially deep team, and they don’t score much against good opponents. In fact, in ten out of fourteen games against NCAA Tournament teams this season, Boise State couldn’t even score 70 points– and in two of the four that they did, they played overtime.
But Boise State does defend well, and Boise State does rebound well. The Broncos defend the three-point line very well and force a lot of opposing offenses to go inside on them for tough shots in the paint, and rely on their size down low to either block shots or rebound the misses. So Florida is going to have to hit shots from the outside, and Tyrese Samuel is going to have to be on his A-game, for the Gators to survive against the Broncos.
However, Boise State’s bigs also haven’t had to face too many frontcourts like Florida’s– even without Micah Handlogten. Boise State’s Omar Stanley is 6’8, 240, and fellow big man Tyson Degenhart is 6’8, 235. That’s big, but not as big as Samuel, who stands 6’10, 240 and who honed his paint skills by going up against the likes of Kentucky, Tennessee, Alabama, and Auburn a total of eight times this year. So he’ll be ready for the challenge should this matchup come to pass.
Florida also has the even taller Alex Condon, the Aussie freshman who stands 6’11 and is no shrinking violet himself at 230 pounds and hauls down a healthy 6.3 rebounds per game. So it’s not that Florida won’t miss Handlogten in this game down low, but more of a “we’ll miss him but we should be able to overcome his absence” sort of deal.
Also worth paying attention to in this game are guards Max Rice and Chibuzo Agbo, who can both collect fouls and get to the free throw line and score from the floor. But Florida– barring an absolutely disastrous performance from both Walter Clayton Jr. and Zyon Pullin– should have the better guard play in this one.
All in all, I definitely wouldn’t say this is an optimal matchup for Florida, because Boise State is one of the better rebounding teams the Gators will have faced. But the Broncos aren’t the best rebounding team the Gators will have faced this year, either, not by a long shot. And Boise State’s offensive struggles against tournament-caliber opposition leaves them susceptible to a blowout if the Gators can merely battle them to a draw on the boards and have even just a decent shooting night.
Colorado
Many Gator pundits and fans alike are saying they would much rather face Colorado than Boise State, and to a certain degree, it makes sense. Colorado doesn’t have the size Boise State has, doesn’t defend like Boise State does, and played a far weaker schedule than Boise State did. At first glance, this could seem like a very appealing matchup.
However, when doing my research on the Buffaloes, one statistic stood out: Colorado shoots a blazing 39.4% from three-point land. That is a terrifying number, particularly for a Florida team that’s been pretty Jekyll-and-Hyde in terms of defending the perimeter this year. There have been games and times where the Gators defended the arc well… and there have been times where they have not, like against Ole Miss (8-20) and LSU (11-21).
Look out for KJ Simpson in particular, who’s scoring 19.6 points per game and can do it from anywhere on the floor. He can get to the free throw line and score from there, or he can simply stand behind the arc and fire away threes– which he makes 45.3% of the time. He’s also a great rebounder, pulling in 5.7 boards per game, and a facilitator of the offense, as evidenced by his 4.9 assists per game.
Another thing to note is that while Colorado doesn’t have very many good wins, they do have two of them against Washington State. The Cougars are coached by former Todd Golden mentor Kyle Smith, who uses all the same advanced analytics that Golden does and has his team play a very similar style of ball. So while the Buffaloes haven’t faced the Gators this year, they’ve already beaten a team that plays the same type of ball as the Gators– twice.
That said, the Buffaloes were one of the last four teams into the field for a reason. Colorado is giving up 71.2 points per game, which isn’t terrible, but also isn’t that great. And there are some pretty glaring anomalies in there. Arizona, which has the third-best scoring offense in the nation, dropped 196 points on the Buffs in two 80-minute games. That’s a fairly good indication of what Florida– with the sixth-best scoring offense in the country– might be able to do against them. And Florida should have a notable advantage down low with Samuel, Condon, and Thomas Haugh against the talented but raw Tristan de Silva and Cody Williams.
Still, Colorado is dangerous from the outside, and the Gators had better be ready to defend the arc for all its worth. If they do, Florida’s superior big men should be able to do enough in this game to advance.
Marquette
Should the Gators survive its opening round battle against either Colorado or Boise State, their likely second round opponent would be Marquette, coached by former Florida assistant Shaka Smart. There’s no doubt Marquette is a very good basketball team: 25-9, with three of those nine losses coming to the #1 overall seed Connecticut, #8 on Bart Torvik’s advanced metrics site, #12 on Ken Pomeroy’s advanced metrics site, and #8 in the final AP Poll. Good, but not great.
But there’s one quirk about the Golden Eagles that could have them ripe for an upset: their rebounding. Or should I say, lack thereof. Marquette is astoundingly bad at rebounding the basketball, with an overall rebounding delta of -2 on the season. That, in case you’re wondering, is good for 301st in the 351-team NCAA Division I. Florida, on the other hand, is one of the best rebounding teams in the nation, and even without Handlogten, the Gators should be able to own the glass against them.
There’s another reason to be nervous about betting on Marquette, too. They’re not even close to fully healthy. The one dependable rebounder the Golden Eagles do have, Oso Ighodaro, is expected to play after missing nine games due to a foot injury– but he’s not expected to be 100%. Also listed as probable with an oblique injury is guard Tyler Kolek, but he, too, is not expected to be at 100%. Not having two of their three best overall players does not bode well for the Eagles against anybody in the Round of 32– whether that’s Florida, Boise State, or Colorado.
Marquette can still score, though, as overall leading scorer Kam Jones (16.8 points per game) is an all-around threat who is especially deadly from three. Without Kolek and Ighodaro at full strength, I might be more willing to take the Golden Eagles’ adjusted tempo ranking on KenPom (21st) with a bit of a grain of salt, but you can still expect Marquette to hit shots and keep up with Florida in a track meet type of game.
The Golden Eagles can also cause problems for Florida’s guards if they press and trap, which they do a lot. Marquette forces 14.71 turnovers a game with a frenetic pace on defense– that’s good for 26th best in the country– and then they can get into their transition game, which can be deadly. Marquette scores 13.06 points per game on fast breaks, which is 39th in the country, so Florida guards Walter Clayton and Zyon Pullin better be ready.
I wouldn’t go as far as to say that Marquette is a game Florida should win, but this is as favorable of a matchup as one could ever expect out of a Regional 2 seed. Even in non-Gator fan bracket pools, you can expect quite a few people to pick the Gators to pull the upset here.
