It's been a struggle for much of the season, but UF coach Mike White appears to have made something of a breakthrough with his players regarding culture, the results of which showed up in much-needed back-to-back victories last week.
UF's Upward Trend Faces Big Test at No. 13 LSU
Wednesday, February 20, 2019 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
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By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
BATON ROUGE, La. — Though peppered and prodded, Mike White didn't give in Tuesday asked to to gauge the significance of Saturday's upset victory at Alabama. Each lob that came at the Florida basketball coach was met with a shoulder shrug and a non-committal couple words.
How big was it? You had to have it to reach your goals, right? Do you really not think look at it that way?
Eventually came an answer better than his first one, which was, "They're all big." Which they are, by the way. But White was thinking bigger. As in bigger picture.
"If our guys are looking at that stuff, they're worried about the wrong things," White said. "Our guys should have been as focused [against] Florida Gulf Coast at a neutral site as they were at Alabama or as they were against Tennessee at home. You want to win every game. You want to get better. You want to be incredibly competitive and accountable."
Then came a little more reference to his team's current predicament.
"It was a big win for us because opportunities are running out. I don't know what the future holds for this team a month from now. I know we got another in Baton Rouge."
[Read senior writer Chris Harry's comprehensive "Pregame Stuff" setup here]
And it just so happens to the next one, as well as one of the most difficult challenges the Gators (14-11, 6-6), winners of two straight and teetering on the bubble as far as their NCAA Tournament hopes are concerned, will face this season. The 13th-ranked Louisiana State Tigers (21-4, 11-1) have won 14 of their previous 15, are tied with Tennessee atop the Southeastern Conference standings with three weeks to go in the regular season, are just a week removed from upsetting then-No. 7 Kentucky on the road, and figure to have a rabid home crowd Wednesday night at Maravich Assembly with a chance to inch closer to the program's first league title since 2009. Freshman point guard Andrew Nembhard
"I like that we're coming off a game that we played very well, to win in Tuscaloosa, and so it's a good sign," White said. "Hopefully, there's another one of those in us or a few of those in us — preferably every game — but we'll see."
It's the third week in February, so speculation about the NCAA Tournament is all the buzz of college basketball. At Duke, Kentucky, Virginia, Gonzaga, Michigan and the like, they're not concerned about getting in the tournament, but where they'll be playing and how high they'll be seeded. Florida hopes "March Madness" is in its 2019 future, but the Gators remain in control of their circumstances, starting with a chance for a gold-star win on the road Wednesday.
But there's way more to it than that.
In the coming weeks, the term "Quad 1" (and even "Quad 2") will be uttered a lot by college basketball talking heads, as they breakdown the NET metrics that ultimately will seed the NCAA Tournament's field of 68 teams. The NET -- which is the latest numerology that assigns a digit to the "Who'd you play? Where'd you play? And who''d you beat?" system -- rates Division I teams 1 through 352. The following criteria constitutes a Quad 1 game:
* Playing a Top 30 NET team at home.
* Playing a Top 50 NET team on a neutral site.
* Playing a Top 75 NET team on the road.
The metrics change daily (and are affected by every game), but through 25 games UF is 3-10 in Q-1 games, with those 13 games being the most any SEC team has played. Because the Gators have played such an ambitious schedule, they awoke Wednesday as the No. 33 team in the NET. The Tigers are No. 14, meaning a 14th Q-1 game will go in the books Wednesday night, with two more coming on the UF schedule next month: March 6 vs. LSU at Gainesville and March 9 at Kentucky.
Before that, Florida is home to Missouri Saturday, on the road at Vanderbilt next week then home over the weekend to Georgia. Those three teams occupy the bottom of the SEC standings and will loom as Q-3 games, meaning Florida needs to win those. The NCAA Selection Committee gives the stink eye to bubble teams with bad losses late in the season.
Bottom line: An 18-win regular season is possible, but hardly a given when the season and the way the Gators have performed is taken in its entirety. But an 18-win regular season may also be enough for a team that's played one of the nation's toughest schedules in a crazy 2018-19 season when the bubble doesn't look all that impressive.
The Gators, meanwhile, have shown some signs of growth of late, especially on offense, where UF worked some of its best ball movement of the season at Bama and ultimately shot 54 percent for the game and were far less reliant on the 3-point shot (31 attempts from inside the arc versus 19 beyond it). And then there was the offensive outbreak last week of freshman point guard Andrew Nembhard, who missed the first shot he took in a win over Vanderbilt, then proceeded to hit his next 13 over two games, including a perfect 9-for-9, career-high 21-point display against the Crimson Tide.
"I just think we've been a little bit more focused lately," Nembhard said. "Hopefully we're more confident as a group."
