Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — Moments before Saturday night's tipoff, Kentucky guard Isaiah Briscoe lined up alongside Devin Robinson and sent a little pregame message the Florida junior forward's way. Amid the deafening din of Exactech Arena, Briscoe threw down. 

"All you guys are soft," Briscoe said.  

Think about that as you read some of the numbers in the paragraphs below because as Briscoe and his teammates soon found out there was nothing soft about what went down over the next two-hours; at least not from the Florida side. The 24th-ranked Gators crushed the No. 8 Wildcats like they'd never before, using red-hot second-half shooting and a beastly effort on the boards to roll to an 88-66 victory in front of record and rollicking new O'Dome crowd of 11,171 and a prime-time ESPN audience.

Senior point guard Kasey Hill, relegated to the bench for most of the first half due to foul trouble, scored a career-high 21 points to go with five rebounds and six assists. Robinson took Briscoe's challenge to heart in scoring 16 points and grabbing a game-high nine rebounds, while fifth-year senior forward Canyon Barry came off the bench to throw in 14 points. Sophomore guard KeVaughn Allen had 12 points. Junior guard Chris Chiozza had nine rebounds and nine assists off the bench. 

When the final horn sounded, the Gators (18-5, 8-2) had shot 48.4 percent from the floor, including 66.7 on 18-for-27 marksmanship in the second half, and run roughshod on the glass against one of the nation's premier rebounding teams by a 54-29 count. The 22-point victory margin was the largest by a Florida team in the 90-year history of the series and the worst loss by a top-10 Kentucky team in 25 years. 

The Wildcats (18-5, 8-2), the nation's third-highest scoring team at 91.3 points per game, were held to their fewest points of the year. They exited the building ... well ... softly. 

"Florida outplayed us, out-coached us, they did everything sideways and deserved to win," UK coach John Calipari said after losing for the third time in four games. "Now I get to watch the tape on the plane. That'll be a nice ride home."
 
The win was UF's fourth straight, with the previous three coming by at least 32 points, and put the Gators in a tie with the Wildcats for second place in the SEC standings, one game behind league-leading South Carolina. 

But it meant much more than that, especially for a program in its second year under Coach Mike White and in search of that signature victory for the postseason resume. 

"I told our guys, 'Hey, beating Kentucky is great. They're one of the best teams in the country … but we are too,' " White said. "We were locked in, but I thought we were locked in for Missouri, too." 

Oh, they were. That was two nights earlier and the Gators won by 39. They were locked in at Oklahoma before that. And at LSU before that. Over Florida's last four games — since that confounding home loss to Vanderbilt on Jan. 21 and the no-holds-barred team meeting that followed — the Gators have held their four opponents to a combined 34.7-percent shooting overall, 23.6 from the 3-point line and have a plus-68 rebounding edge.

"We've been a different team defensively these last four games, though it helps that shots are going in at the rate they're going in," White said. "But they made a commitment to going back and defending like they're capable of." 

That was evident against Kentucky from the jump, with Hill's energy on both ends setting the tone.  The Gators, who never trailed, scored the game's first five points and started inching their lead out in increments. It was seven after 10 minutes, then 13 after back-to-back 3-pointers from Robinson and backup guard Eric Hester, but down to eight at halftime. UF went to the locker room having held UK to just 30 percent from the floor and the SEC's scoring leader, freshman guard Malik Monk, without a point, but lamenting blown opportunities from 12 turnovers. 

"We turned it over a bunch, but we played hard on defense and made up for it," Robinson said. 

Kentucky freshman point guard De'Aaron Fox (19 points), who missed Tuesday night's home win over Georgia with an illness, didn't let his team go away quietly. Though UF's Justin Leon opened the second half with a 3-pointer to push the Gators up 11, Fox keyed a run of seven straight points that made it a four-point game and sent a sense of angst through the building.

Not through the Florida bench, though. 

"We're an older team, we have some older guys," said Chiozza, one of six upperclassmen in a rotation that stared down UK's four fab freshmen starters. "We weren't going to panic."  

Barry made a nice baseline spin move and banked in a layup. Then he hit a 3-pointer in transition to get the lead back to 11. Monk, who came in averaging 22.3 points per game, answered by hitting his first shot of the game — a 3-pointer — at the 16:15 mark. Held to just 11 points on 4-for-14 shooting, Monk hit another trey with 13 minutes left that cut the lead to seven. 
 
The score was 62-52 with 10 minutes left when Robinson head-faked Fox in the corner and dropped a 3, which started a run of 14 straight points and sent the O'Dome atmosphere to a fevered pitch. There was no chance, not on this night, of a Kentucky comeback. 

"It was all heart. We felt like we wanted it more and felt like we had to go and take it," said Robinson, whose counterpart, Briscoe, had six points, three rebounds and four turnovers. "We had to prove something to these guys. They were chatting at the beginning about all our guys being soft. We had to prove we weren't. We went hard at them."

Very hard. As in the opposite of soft. 

After the game, Hill was asked to comment on the significance of the night. 

"It's big," he said. "But now we have a quick turn-around to get ready to go to Georgia."

The ol' routine, on-to-the-next-game quote after a statement-making defeat of the conference standard-bearer. That's not just hard, that's hardcore.