(Photo via Gator basketball social media team)
They say you’ll never forget your first. And to be sure, the Florida Gators won’t.
Tennessee’s basketball team sure would like to, though.
On Saturday afternoon, the Florida Gator basketball team trudged onto its team plane in Lexington, KY, losers for the first time in fourteen games. Around that same time, Tennessee was celebrating a big win, one that kept them unbeaten, over a ranked Arkansas team to open up SEC play.
As the SEC tends to go, though, the Ferris wheel spun sequentially. What was down came up. And what was up came down– crashing down, really– in an unforeseen smackdown that took the college basketball world by storm and shattered Tennessee’s previously unblemished loss column in a way that’s going to hurt some feelings up on Rocky Top for quite some time.
There was nothing that could be done to stop what was about to happen on Tuesday night. Not a screaming Rick Barnes, not the suspicious officiating, (which called eight of the game’s first eleven fouls on Florida) not Chaz Lanier and his average of 20.3 points a game, and not even the man who steals over a million dollars a year from the University of Florida’s payroll as he pretends to “lead” the Gators’ athletics program. This was Florida’s night.
Alijah Martin drained four of his five threes as part of an 18-point night, Denzel Aberdeen added 16 and the Florida defense suffocated Tennessee’s offense in a 73-43 evisceration in the Gators’ first ever win over the #1 ranked team in the O’Dome. The win improves Florida to 14-1 and will surely be an unignorable bullet point on Selection Sunday– which might just see the Gator basketball team vying for a top Regional seed.
Because Florida didn’t merely hand Tennessee its first loss of the season. The Gator basketball team embarrassed the Vols from start to finish.
Florida scored the first 12 points of the game, limited Lanier to just half his season average (ten points) and forced twelve turnovers– scoring seventeen points in transition for an added bonus. Tennessee, to be fair, did some of the damage to itself, failing to hit uncontested shots of varying degrees of easiness throughout the night. At one point, the Vols were just 7-for-48 from the floor– a pathetic 14.58% field goal percentage.
The drubbing came despite Scott Stricklin choosing to deliver the ultimate insult to UF students– barring them from sitting in the student section. Apparently, just because the students were on vacation, Stricklin felt justified in pawning off all but 60 of the lower bowl tickets that typically go to students to fans of different demographics– you know, the less noisy and problematic-for-the-opponent ones– for a nice profit. Never mind the fact that hundreds of Florida students returned to campus early for this game; Scott Stricklin had decided that he wanted to make money, so he ordered the security guards to boot the students out of their own section.
To say this was infuriating from a fan perspective is an understatement. Even before this decision, there was no combination of words that can capture the extent of Gator fans’ loathing of Scott Stricklin, ranging from his refusal to promote Florida’s NIL endeavors to his very refusal to accept reality itself. In fact, he seems to relish in outright lying to the very people who sacrifice their own hard-earned money to support the Gators’ athletics program. This move was merely another leaf on top of a truckload of reasons to harbor vitriol toward him.
But not even Florida’s terroristic debutante of an AD could help Tennessee on this night.
Every single measurable statistic went Florida’s way. It was 30-19 at halftime in terms of rebounds, and 24-6 Florida in terms of points in the paint. By the time the game ended, those numbers had ballooned to 55-38 in the rebound tally and a ridiculous 40-14 in points in the paint.
For that matter, even some of Florida’s bad possessions turned out well. Up 64-35 in the final minutes, Alijah Martin picked up a loose ball with the shot clock dwindling down, and actually turned and looked the other way– at the other hoop– before twisting in midair and draining a three from a few feet behind the line. That, by itself, summed up the night.
While the students will rightfully remember this night as example #983,420,201 of why Scott Stricklin is in desperate need of a one-way catapult ride out of Alachua County, most Gator fans– and the rest of college basketball– will recall January 7, 2025 as the day the Gator basketball team sledgehammered mighty Tennessee for its first-ever win in the O’Dome against a top-ranked opponent.
And that, despite all the ulcers Stricklin causes those who foot the bills of his business, is example #983,420,202 of why it’s truly great to be a Florida Gator.
