Senior guard Will Richard holds his sweet follow-through on one of his six 3-pointers on the way to 25 points in Saturday night's 89-70 defeat of Texas A&M
Gators Rebound for Second-Half Pounding of Aggies
Sunday, March 2, 2025 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
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By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – The scouting report could have been as simple as this: rebound, rebound and rebound.
Florida's coaches and players understood that Saturday's night's game against Texas A&M would have been suitable to be played across the street at Ben Hill Griffin Stadium. The Aggies came to town with a reputation as one of the best defensive and one of the most physical teams in the country.
With rebounders galore.
By game's end, the third-ranked Gators had more rebounds than the No. 12 Aggies, with the offensive boards and second-chance points basically ending in a push. As for scoring against the stubborn fellas from A&M, senior guard Will Richard and a handful of teammates had that covered in their 89-70 victory at sold-out Exactech Arena/O'Connell Center.
Richard scored 25 points, dropped a half-dozen 3-pointers and grabbed six rebounds in 31 minutes. The 6-foot-4 senior wing, who tossed in a career-high 30 four nights earlier in the troubling loss at Georgia, buried nine of 13 shots, six of nine from distance and was the high-point man for the Gators (25-4, 12-4) among five UF players in double figures. But it was the team's collective work on the glass – a 42-37 overall edge and virtual tie on the offensive end (A&M by 1) and second-chance points (A&M by 1) – that most pleased Coach Todd Golden in what he called a "great bounce-back" from three nights earlier at Athens.
"Just going toe to toe with those guys for 40 minutes and seeing how physical they are, how much talent they have, how competitive they are, I'm just incredibly proud of the way we played and our ability to kind of get away from them at the end," Golden said after winning for the seventh time in eight games and pulling even with Alabama for second place in the SEC standings. "But they made it really hard on us in the second half."
Eventually, the Gators' superior talent and effort that matched the Aggies' proved the difference.
Sophomore forward Thomas Haugh had 17 points, followed by fifth-year guard Allijah Martin's 14, including four 3s in the first half. Sophomore forward Alex Condon, in his second game back from an ankle sprain that cost him four games, was an active force inside with 11 points on 5-for-6 shooting – with a couple crowd-pleasing dunks in the pivotal final minutes – to go with a game-high nine rebounds. Senior guard Walter Clayton Jr. had 10 points and was a game-best plus-20 on his box score line. Junior center Micah Handlogten had just two points, but grabbed eight rebounds, including four on the offensive end, had two steals, two assists and two blocks and was plus-16 in 20 minutes off the bench.
UF shot 47.8 percent for the game (the Aggies were allowing 39.9) and carded 21 assists, made 14 3-pointers at 42.4 percent (the Aggies were allowing 8.5 at 32.7) and the scored the second-most points against A&M this season (the Aggies were allowing 66.7 per game).
The Gators held the Aggies to 38.9 percent and just five 3-pointers at 29.4 percent. A&M had just three assists for the game.
Sophomore forwardAlex Condon (21) was 5-for-6 from the floor with a couple authoritative flushes like this one in the second half.
"[Florida is] as good as any team in the country," said A&M coach Buzz Williams, whose squad was ranked seventh two weeks ago, but has now lost four straight in the brutal SEC, though is still well positioned for a third straight NCAA Tournament berth. "Coach [Golden] has done a fabulous job. His staff, the roster construction, style of play … they're going to put stress on you regardless."
The Aggies (20-9, 9-7), in turn, are going to put bodies on you regardless. The Gators, after taking a couple early punches underneath (A&M led 16-10 after six minutes), started bodying back, while Richard and Martin did work from the outside.
"I think we did a good job in practice. It starts there," Haugh said of preparing for the basketball equivalent of a football game. "That's obviously what A&M does. They are a crazy, crazy good offensive rebounding team; best in the nation. So, we worked on rebounding a lot in practice and it showed up in the game. We knew we had to come out with an edge and physicality and stuff like that."
UF led 45-34 at halftime, with Richard starting the second half with a couple 3s that shot the Gators to a 17-point lead not two minutes into the period.
With less than nine minutes to go, however, the Florida lead was just six, as the Aggies were making a living on the attack and getting to the free-throw line. The O'Dome had an eerie, kind of pseudo-lifeless feel to it.
Richard and Condon fixed that, taking the cue from Golden to attack A&M's extended defense.
"Coach emphasized just not slowing down when they went into their press," said Richard, who during the game -- get this -- passed both Al Horford and Joakim Noah and moved to No. 42 on UF's all-time scoring list with 1,138 points. "We just did a great job staying aggressive. Condon did a great job making passes and plays, and I just hit open looks. It was good for us to finish a game that way. It was something that we can definitely build on."
Fifth-year guard Alijah Martin (15) hit four 3s in the first half.
First, Richard hit a 3 to wake up the Rowdies, but A&M point guard Wade Taylor IV came back with one of his own. So Richard hit another one. The next Florida possessions ended with emphatic, two-handed slams by Condon that rocked the building and put the Gators up 11 with just over six minutes remaining.
Two Taylor free throws made it a nine-point margin, but A&M's defense let Clayton walk unfettered into one of his logo 3s that made it a 12-point game. After an Aggie free throw, Richard's sixth 3 put the Gators up 14.
A&M cut it to 10 with three minutes to go, but UF scored the game's final nine points to close out its 21stdouble-digit victory, nine of them coming in conference play.
"You have to bounce back in this league or else you can catch yourself in a two- or three- or four- game losing streak -- and you can be a great team and be in the middle of that," Golden said, after avoiding (again) dropping back-to-back games this season, while basically describing A&M's current situation. "I think it shows a lot about our maturity, our ability to kind of flush losses, but also learn from the mistakes we made in those games."
There's a toughness to doing that. That toughness rose to the occasion Saturday.
Email senior writer Chris Harry at chrish@gators.ufl.edu
