How Florida’s late-season surge reshapes its NCAA outlook
College basketball is a sport of volatility.
With 31 games and roster turnover more stark than that of your alma mater’s other pastimes, even the best teams often still have some cuts they’re screening from opponents. And at times, the bandaging unravels. That’s when this sport is at its best. Upsets are its lifeblood.
So you pick the year: at least 80% of the top 15 teams in the country will lose to a lower-ranked foe in the final four weeks of the regular season. Last year, that happened 44 times, and not a single top-ranked team went unscathed. Houston came the closest, losing to No. 22 Texas Tech on Feb. 1 before rattling off 18 consecutive victories en route to the national championship game. But this is a new campaign, and it’s already one of 12 top 15 teams entering Saturday to get caught up this month.
The current survivors? Michigan, Purdue, Kansas … and Florida (21-6, 12-2 in the Southeastern Conference). The No. 12 Gators, with a 94-75 win against Ole Miss on Saturday, are among the hottest teams in the country, and this weekend was an (early) judgment day for how far Florida’s come. The NCAA Tournament selection committee agreed when putting the Gators as the top No. 3 seed in the first reveal of its current top 16 seeds. Florida, under coach Todd Golden, is the most consistent February team in the country. The Gators haven’t lost since Jan. 24, and a year ago, they only lost twice after Jan. 15.
What does Florida know that others don’t?
“They’re playing really well,” South Carolina coach Lamont Paris said, searching for answers after a 76-62 loss to Florida on Tuesday. “They’re playing better now than when they were then.”
That doesn’t entirely explain this phenomenon. Most teams improve as the season wears on, though what Florida does might be better described in research terms — this is, truly, a project other college basketball coaches, like Paris, will study.
The Gators are in the final stages of a quasi-metamorphosis, the creation of Golden’s Frankenstein cosplay. When Florida began this season, the transfer guards it tasked with replacing last year’s stars, Walter Clayton Jr. and Co., were shooting as if they were Clayton Jr. and Co. Florida took more than 27 three-pointers six times in the first month of the season, many of which came from Boogie Fland and Xaivian Lee, those transfer guards. Yet, now, the Gators have taken that many attempts only once, since Jan. 10. Their hit rate is also peaking, knocking down more than 35% in three of their last six games — a jump, relative to the 26% average Florida sported while gathering four of its six losses in the first six weeks of the season.
That spacing, coupled with an amped focus on pushing the ball into the paint with its three 6-foot-9-plus starters, has made Florida’s offense into the type of machine that’s scored 86 points or more in six of its last seven games. It has the 11th-best offensive efficiency in the country since its last loss, which is about the range it needed to reach in the first place because … it has the best defensive efficiency in the country by more than three points per 100 possessions. The rest of the top eight only deviates by 4.2.
This whole deal traces back to the mind-set of its coach. “There’s an expectation right now with our program that if we’re not up 15 at halftime, and we don’t win by 25, that something isn’t going right,” Golden said. “Every win is a great win.”
And Florida practices like all these victories come as the result of a life-or-death game of roulette to remain atop the SEC.
“Coach made a big emphasis on not being complacent in this game,” Florida forward Alex Condon said on Tuesday. “It’s not just another game. … It’s almost like a trap.”
But to answer our original, central question, Florida peaks this late in the season because improvement is more of a mental state than a hope in Gainesville. Golden switches player roles and charts offensive overhauls with regularity, then the Gators seem to see each game as a practice of their new assignment.
Lesser foes don’t really catch a team that’s playing more for its own adjustments.
“Especially later in the year, the mental part of it’s really important and staying fresh and staying focused,” Golden said on Friday. “We only got five league games left, two at home.
“The postseason will be here before you know it.”
As Saturday showed, Florida seems to be ready for it.
