Florida Gators

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — As the players were wrapping the last of round of Sunday's three waves of individual workouts, a text went out to members of the Florida basketball team to be at the practice facility for a meeting at 4 p.m. The gathering was pushed back to 4:30, then again to 5. To a man, each player figured Coach Mike White wanted to address the squad about their collective frame of mind as they tuned into the first NCAA Tournament selection show in six years that would not include the Gators. 

As it turned out, White was about 45 minutes late for a meeting. When he walked into the locker room, UF athletic director Scott Stricklin was at his side. 

Then White lowered the boom. He'd taken the Georgia job. 

"Everybody was just shocked," senior forward Colin Castleton said. "We weren't mad. We weren't sad. Just shocked." 

Only two weekends prior, the Gators went to Athens, Ga., and beat the Bulldogs for a sixth consecutive time. Four days earlier, they'd lost at the overtime buzzer to Texas A&M in the second-round of the Southeastern Conference Tournament, ending any shot at a fifth straight NCAA berth. Now this rather unexpected development. They all but surely had at least one game left to play, but this was a lot to unpack; for some more than others. 

It definitely hit the freshmen hard, but nearly half the players in the locker room were transfers who had been through some kind of collegiate coaching change during their careers. Castleton, for example, had played for three head coaches and about a dozen different assistants.  

"Just me, being a man and having been taught what I've been taught along the way, you've got a wife and kids, so you put them first," graduate guard Brandon McKissic said of White's decision. "There was nothing to be upset about. He was thinking about his family, but also getting a great opportunity for himself."  And then White walked out to begin work on what figures to be a massive reclamation project. The Bulldogs won six games this season. 

The Gators (19-13) were much better than that, but only good enough to earn a home NIT date Wednesday night against Coach Rick Pitino and his Iona Gaels (25-7), regular-season champions of the Metro Atlantic Conference, at Exactech Arena. Stricklin tabbed UF associate head coach Al Pinkins to take charge of the team on an interim basis, duties that officially began when White exited the room Sunday night. 

[Read senior writer Chris Harry's "Pregame Stuff" setup here]

"I thought our players took the news pretty hard Sunday, but I thought Monday they came in and we probably had one of our best practices of the year," Pinkins said. "For your kids to put what happened behind them and in 24 hours come back and practice the way they did just shows what we've been saying all year; that this is a really good group of guys."

And they get to play together a while longer. No, they're not in the tournament the Gators wanted to be in; or thought they'd be in. But this is the one they earned and the only one they have. How the team approaches it, both mentally is physically, is in the players' hands.  Castleton, the team's leader, took the lead on that front. 

"Obviously, it sucked at the beginning, just knowing I wasn't going to be able to play in the tournament my senior year, but you have to wake up the next day and have a positive mindset," he said. "At the end of the day, it's another chance to be able to hoop and play the game we love. If you do truly love it, you can't be mad about having the opportunity to play another game. Yeah, it's disappointing. 'March Madness' is what we all dream of and work for. But it's another tournament and there are going to be some really good teams in it."

McKissic, who in four seasons at Missouri-Kansas City never sniffed the postseason (not the CIT CBI, much less the NIT), had no trouble getting his mind right. The team talked about how it won the first tournament it played in this season — the Fort Myers Tip-Off, topped with Tyree Appleby's 28-foot buzzer-beater to defeat Ohio State in the final — and how it now has a chance to win the last tournament of the year. 

"You have to be positive," McKissic. "It's a weird situation we're in, but that's also why you have to embrace it. We all come from such different basketball backgrounds, most of us from places that struggled or were at the bottom. OK, so it's not 'March Madness,' but it's still basketball. That's what we do. Might as well try to make something happen with it."  Like McKissic, graduate wing Phlandrous Fleming Jr. was postseason-less during his all-star career at Charleston Southern. Also like McKissic, he wanted desperately to experience the NCAA Tournament, but these are the cards the season dealt. 

Worth noting: Last season, as a senior at CSU, Fleming's team won three games. 

Fleming got a call Sunday night from an old AAU coach looking to cheer him up. Think back, the coach said, to six years ago to when Fleming was the Class 5A Georgia Player of the Year, yet had just one low-major scholarship offer to show for everything he'd put into the game. 

"He wanted to remind me of what all I'd been through," Fleming said. "He asked me, 'If I told you six years ago that in your final college season you'd be playing in the NIT for the Florida Gators, would you take that?' "

Fleming didn't have to think too long about it. He grinned. "Sure, I would."

And then there's Pinkins, who at 44 and with stints as an assistant coach at Middle Tennessee State, Ole Miss, Tennessee and Texas Tech over the last 19 years will get a first crack at a game that officially will show up on his won-loss resume. Pinkins has worn the "interim" tag before, but only for a few weeks in an offseason after a coaching change. This one will count.

That's got to be a kind of exciting, right?

"I'm a pretty level-headed guy; not too high, not too low," Pinkins said. "I'm excited about it, even though I may not look excited. I'm going to go into it like I would any game, coach like I know how to coach and try to keep an even keel. Just try to make it like normal circumstances." 

That will be his charge, for sure. The overall situation, however, will be anything but normal.