Franz Beard’s Basketball Confidential

The week of limbo is over which means things are getting back to normal for Florida basketball. Now that we know for sure that Billy Donovan is going to be Florida’s basketball coach for several more years and the flirtation with the NBA is a thing of the past, it’s camp time in Gainesville and it’s just two more weeks.

The week of limbo is over which means things are getting back to normal for Florida basketball. Now that we know for sure that Billy Donovan is going to be Florida’s basketball coach for several more years and the flirtation with the NBA is a thing of the past, it’s camp time in Gainesville and it’s just two more weeks.

The elite camp will be this weekend and some of the bigger names won’t be here. A lot of that has to do with the week of limbo when no one was certain if Billy D was or was not going to be the coach. Also, with Samardo Samuels committing to Louisville to go with Trey Thompkins commit to Georgia and Al-Farouq Aminu dropping the Gators from his favorite’s list, the recruiting deck has been shuffled.

The elite camp will have a lot of truly outstanding younger players and we’ll report about them this weekend.

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Franz Beard
Back in January of 1969, the late, great Jack Hairston, then the sports editor of the Jacksonville Journal, called me on the phone one night and asked me if I wanted to work for him. I said yes. The entire interview took 30 seconds. It's my experience that whenever the interview lasts 30 seconds or less, I get the job. In the 48 years that I've been writing and getting paid for it, I've covered Super Bowls, World Series, NCAA basketball championships, BCS championship games, heavyweight title fights and what seems like thousands of college football, baseball and basketball games. I'm a columnist and special assignments editor for Gator Country once again, writing about the only team that ever mattered to me, the Florida Gators.