Florida Gators

Photo Gallery by Courtney Culbreath and Andre Larrow

NEW YORK — They were red-hot in the first half Sunday with no discernible sign of fatigue. The No. 4-seed Florida Gators hit shots, skied for rebounds and genuinely matched on the intensity front arguably the most physical team in college basketball, Southeastern Conference rival South Carolina, to take a seven-point lead to the locker room. 

And then everything changed. 

In the second half, the seventh-seeded Gamecocks made the hustle plays, beat the Gators' defense to spots, drew fouls, grabbed big boards and completely flipped the script on the way to a 77-70 victory in the NCAA East Region title game in front of a sold-out crowd of 20,047 dressed mostly in maroon-and-red and celebrating the program's first Final Four berth in school history. 

Senior guard Sindarius Thornwell, the 2017 SEC Player of the Year, was superb in scoring 26 points, grabbing seven rebounds and serving as the catalyst for a defense that overwhelmed UF after intermission, allowing only 33-percent shooting from the floor and zero 3-point field goals on 14 tries. During one stretch in the second half, Thornwell scored eight straight points (and 10 of 12, with an assist on the other basket) in a run that pushed the Gamecocks ahead and ultimately sent the Gators (27-9) to their fourth Elite Eight loss in the last seven seasons. 

It was quite the come-down, considering mere hours earlier, UF was at the intersection of Cloud 9 and Broadway.

"It's tough," said UF junior guard Chris Chiozza, whose heroics two nights before — the running 3-pointer to beat Wisconsin at the buzzer in the Sweet 16 — were the reason his team played Sunday. "All that adrenaline, all that excitement. It was a great feeling. Now you're on the losing end and your season is over." 

Adrenaline and excitement were bound to go only so far against the Gamecocks (26-10) and their rugged pound-on-you-for-40-minutes ways. Think about it. Sunday's game tipped at 2:20 p.m., exactly 36 hours after the Gators returned to their Manhattan hotel early Saturday morning wired and emotionally drained from that epic regional semifinal. Not exactly ideal circumstances for recovery and a quick turnaround, but then again, with a trip to the Final Four dangling as a carrot, the UF players surely could summon the energy needed to soldier into the title game.

Against any other opponent, maybe. Not the Gamecocks, whose bumping, banging and beating take a toll over the course of a game, as higher-seeded victims Marquette, Duke and Baylor all learned in tournament succession coming in.

 

Maybe heavy legs were a factor in Florida going 0-for-14 from the 3-point line, getting out-rebounded 23-14 (surrendering some killer offensive boards) and putting the Gamecocks at the free-throw line 28 times after halftime. 

South Carolina coach Frank Martin thought so. 

"They had that hard overtime game. And what was it? Thirty-six hours ago or something like that, by the time they got back to the hotel?" said Martin, whose team gets No. 2-ranked and West Region champion Gonzaga in next Saturday's NCAA semifinal. "Did they kind of run out of juice a little bit? I don't know. I thought they missed some open looks. [But] we played harder [and] we played better offensively." 

That they did. The Gamecocks shot 52 percent after intermission and clamped the Gators to just 31 percent, mostly by denying penetration and making UF settle for 3s. Florida was OK with that in the first half, considering the Gators went 7-for-12 from distance and led 40-33, but the long ones hoisted in the second half turned out like that historically bad 0-for-17 night in a 57-53 loss at Columbia, S.C., when the two teams met Jan. 18. 

In that one, Florida had four days to prepare for the South Carolina onslaught, as opposed to a day and a half. 

UF senior point guard Kasey Hill, however, didn't bite. 

"I don't think that had anything to do with it," he said. 

Senior forward Justin Leon felt the same. 

"We gave ourselves plenty of time to prepare for the game," said Leon, who finished with a team-high 18 points to go with six rebounds. "I think tonight just wasn't our night, I guess."

Then Florida coach Mike White chimed in. 

"I'm so glad these guys didn't make any excuses, that's not what we're about," White said. "South Carolina was better than us. Period."
 
From the start of the second half, that was the case. The Gamecocks immediately cut into Florida's seven-point halftime lead with the first two baskets out of the locker room. UF's biggest lead the rest of the way would be five — just once — but a wave of five fouls whistled against the Gators over a 39-second span put the Gamecocks in the bonus with just under 15 minutes to play. South Carolina would go on to shoot 31 free throws, compared to Florida's 17 against an opponent that led the SEC in fouls committed. 

"Anytime they went into the paint, there was a whistle blown. On five straight possessions they got a foul called," Chiozza said. "They got offensive rebounds and passed the ball out and it's a foul. There's not really much we can do about that. It's the way the whistle was going in the second half. That's the way basketball is sometimes."

With 11:26 to go, forward Maik Kotsar (12 points, 3 rebounds) put back a missed layup for USC's first lead since just over five minutes were left in the opening half. From there, it was six lead changes and five ties over the next nine minutes until an offensive rebound by forward Chris Silva (13 points, 9 rebounds), two free throws by Thornwell and a short jumper from Kotsar accounted for a six-point run that turned the game. For good. 

Still, South Carolina's lead was just 70-68 after a three-point play by UF guard KeVaughn Allen (13 point) with 53.7 seconds left when the Gamecocks tried to throw over UF's defensive full-court pressure. The ball almost sailed out of bounds at the far end, before guard Duane Notice gathered it in time, only to shuffle his feet for not three, but maybe four (even five steps) on the baseline, replays showed, while being harassed by Chiozza.

Chiozza was then called for a foul. 

Notice hit two free throws with 50.4 seconds to go and the Gamecocks took it home (and sent the Gators home) from there. 

"Obviously, very, very heartbreaking. To make it this far, you're right there with a chance to go to the Final Four," White said. "For whatever reason, in the second half, we couldn't match that same defensive intensity, again, which wasn't an 'A,' but it was pretty good. It was probably a 'B' for us." 

With two brutally challenging games crunched so closely together, maybe a "B" was all the Gators had left. 

"No," Hill said. "South Carolina was just better."