(Photo via Florida Gator basketball)
For the better part of three months, Todd Golden’s Gator basketball team was building a classic NCAA bubble team resume. The Gators didn’t have any eyesore losses to especially terrible teams, but they couldn’t beat any of those really good teams, either. Their resume was, for the most part, ho-hum.
Then came Wednesday night’s game at Kentucky’s Rupp Arena, one that was sent to extra time with a critical shot by Walter Clayton Jr. in a full-circle moment for the former Iona Gael, and that Clayton then finished off with a pair of free throws. It’s a game that changed Florida’s outlook, both in the short term and the long term.
As a result of Clayton’s heroics, as well as 20+ point games from Zyon Pullin and Tyrese Samuel, Florida went on the road and beat #10 Kentucky in Lexington, 94-91, in overtime. The win marks just the twelfth all-time Gator victory in Rupp Arena. It’s also the first time Florida has beaten a top ten team on the road since 2003– which for perspective, was a few years before the back-to-back national championships squads.
Not even a month ago, Florida left its home floor disheartened when they had Kentucky on the ropes but let them slip away. On this night, they reversed that fate and finished the game strong.
Trailing for most of the night– albeit never by more than ten– Florida kept hanging around, garnering critical stops and hitting huge shots that kept Kentucky from pulling away. Try as they might, though, the Gators appeared dead when Ugonna Onyeso scored on a putback to make it 83-79 with just 36 seconds remaining. But after Riley Kugel fed Tyrese Samuel for a layup to cut the margin to 83-81 and Florida quickly fouled, Rob Dillingham missed his second free throw. That left the Gators with one last shot.
And they made it count.
Clayton grabbed the board, got it to Zyon Pullin, freed himself up and got the ball back, and slammed his feet into the hardwood floor behind the three-point line. His upper body rose up as if to shoot, drawing Kentucky’s Reed Sheppard over to him to block his game-tying three attempt. But Clayton never left his feet– that is, not until Sheppard had gone flying by him, giving him an uncontested look to send the game to overtime. Which he buried.
Five minutes later, after building a 92-87 lead in overtime, the Gators stood and watched Clayton calmly knock down a pair of free throws to make it a three-possession game in the final seconds to ice the game. And as the kid who grew up a Gator fan but played most of his college ball for Iona under Rick Pitino knocked down that pair of free throws, the Gators shifted the entire cosmos for themselves.
Forget that winless record against Quadrant One opponents. Florida removed that blemish from its resume on Wednesday night, and adjusted its SEC record upward to 5-3 with ten games left with its fourth straight win– and second straight in overtime. The next two games are not going to be especially easy– Texas A&M’s Reed Arena is a difficult place to play and Auburn is a tough team to play, period– but even if the Gators lose them both, they’re in the driver’s seat for the postseason.
Of its final eight games, two are against a paltry Vanderbilt team, two more are against Missouri and LSU teams that are almost as bad as Vandy, and one is against a very average Georgia team that the Gators tried their best to lose to, and yet still managed to acquiesce a victory against. It doesn’t even matter if Florida loses its aforementioned next two games, gets swept by a very good Alabama team in the final two weeks of the season, and loses a road contest to a breakout South Carolina team. 10-8 in the SEC with no real black eye of a loss on its resume is all but a certainty to get Florida into the NCAA Tournament, and even 9-9 in conference play– given the strength of the league– might do it. Florida’s NET staying in the top 40– or potentially even improving to the top 30, which is likely barring a late implosion– would also help lock them in.
And Todd Golden, for all his shortcomings in his first not-even-two-years, has shown a consistent ability to beat teams of clearly lesser caliber. Every now and then, his teams do lose games in which they’re favored, but that doesn’t happen very often– and not once has Florida lost to a team that had no business being on the same floor as them. You know, like how Mike White did against Texas Southern, or a 13-19 Ole Miss team down three starters, or Georgia or South Carolina teams outside the top 125 in the KenPom ratings. That type of loss just doesn’t happen under Golden.
All that means that the Gator basketball team simply has to take care of business this next month, and Todd Golden’s boys are going dancing.
That would be some feat given where this Gator basketball program was just eleven months ago.
Few, if any, Gator fans are willing to outright defend the product Todd Golden and the Gator basketball program put out there in the 2022-23 season. Yes, there was a random stray win against a top five Tennessee team in there, but that was washed away by the totality of a terrible team that finished 16-17 and, for a finale, got humiliated on its home court by Central Florida in the opening round of the NIT.
Part of that team’s problem was that it was screwed before it ever played a game. Various misses in the transfer portal– among them Norchad Omier and Johni Broome– doomed the Gators from the get-go, leaving its lone player of star caliber in Colin Castleton to shoulder far greater of a workload than was fair to ask of him. When Castleton got hurt, Florida had no reliable inside presence, and then things really came apart.
But Golden clearly learned a few tricks from his failures in his first portal run. Winning the battles for veteran pieces like Zyon Pullin, Tyrese Samuel, Clayton Jr. and Micah Handlogten has directly resulted in Florida victories each time one of them had a productive game. Of course there are in-game tactical coaching maneuvers that come into play, like some nice set pieces and some high IQ timeouts from Golden, but this Gator basketball team just has so much more to work with on the floor.
Now, at last, the results are starting to show it.
