Florida Gators alone atop SEC for first time in a decade as it tops Texas A&M

The Florida Gators are now alone atop the SEC for the first time since 2014.

Yes. Pull up Google. Confirm it. That’s where they’re now at.

Let’s look back two months to when everything was cold. Florida was shooting below 28% from three. It had already matched its four losses during last season’s 40-game championship run with four losses in nine attempts this year. With a loss to UConn in Madison Square Garden, it loaded onto a frigid bus en route to nowhere soon.

All Florida coach Todd Golden preached at the time was that his now-No. 17 Gators (17-6, 8-2 in the SEC) just needed to find their form, just as they did a year ago. Even with that hypothetical makeover, it would’ve been hard to imagine the 86-67 dismantling of the SEC’s other top team, Texas A&M (17-6, 7-3 in the SEC), that came Saturday night in College Station, Texas.

“​​Two teams that have played really, really well playing for pole position in this league,” Golden said, scanning the box score. “[It was] a commanding victory.”

Florida torched the Aggies in the second half, scoring 56 behind five double-digit contributors. Forward Thomas Haugh, who we can now retitle from All-American candidate to All-American lock, led with 22. But Isaiah Brown and Urban Klavzar added 23 points off the bench, which ultimately was more of the difference. The Aggies met Florida’s typical porous shooting — which, for whatever it’s worth anymore, took the form of 26.1% from three Saturday — with a 1-for-27 run from the field to open the game.

“Our guys did a really good job of getting them to take the shots that we wanted them to take,” Golden said. “Once they missed a few, I thought it snowballed a little bit.”

In a way, this result still comes within a wave of positivity for all involved parties, just from a 30,000-foot view.

Tuning into this primetime showing on a Disney property, one could’ve thought they were viewing some distant sibling of The Bachelorette — minus the basketballs and the court and the people playing basketball on said court. Think about it: Golden and Bucky McMillan, both among the sport’s youngest coaches, battling for a title that really, truthfully, doesn’t mean a lot if you don’t close the deal later. But what stood out more was the fact that they each had their teams at this point in the first place.

When Billy Donovan was still a college guy, the thought of the SEC’s top two teams (by record) being led by a pair of coaches in the first couple of years at their respective schools would’ve been asinine. When money was a hushed factor in recruiting, it took time to rebuild. Yet McMillan and Golden are the perfect duo to represent the reality show college sports are now engulfed in.

Golden is in his fourth season at Florida, but by Year No. 2, his Gators were flirting with the AP Poll. Everything rolled downhill from there, and Florida, despite some November and December hiccups, is somehow pacing for a No. 3 seed across most projections. Opposingly, McMillan is in his first year at Texas A&M, and similar to Florida in Golden’s first few years, the Aggies are already startlingly competitive. Before this week, they were 7-1 in the SEC.

Why the change in competitiveness? Look to Miami Gardens. A couple of weeks back, ABBA serenaded Fernando Mendoza, and a changing of the guard in college sports. Indiana football’s national championship represented the crowning moment of a new realm where financial backing and intelligent transfer recruiting can shift a program’s luck immediately.

College basketball sponsors even more year-over-year deviation due to players largely being required to play for only one season before declaring for the NBA draft. Rosters have always fluctuated among the sport’s top teams, so Florida replacing its entire backcourt with transfers this year didn’t draw an eye. In the most drastic test case, Texas A&M has won this season with a rotation of 12 players, none of whom played a second for the Aggies last year. Not to say a loss isn’t a loss, but Texas A&M is tracking a similar path to that of Golden’s Gators.

“It takes a lot to come in here calm and collected, knowing we’re going to make mistakes, but also knowing we’re going to execute the plan,” Brown said, with Haugh making an addition: “We executed.”

So just like that, the Gators are one of the hottest teams in the country, rolling into the final stretch of a season that’s probably aged Golden out of reality show contention. Florida’s better for it.