While Tuesday was Groundhog Day, it felt like “Groundhog Day” the movie inside Exactech Arena on Wednesday night.
Once again, the Gators entered a game as one of the hottest teams in the country and ranked in the latest Associated Press poll. Once again, they exited the building with a big fat “L.”
South Carolina played more physically than the No. 22 Gators throughout the night and executed better down the stretch for a 72-66 upset win. It was the first road win of the season for the Gamecocks (5-6, 3-4 SEC), who were coming off of a loss to a Vanderbilt team that had previously been winless in conference play.
Just like that, all of the momentum UF (10-5, 6-4) seemed to have following a four-game winning streak – including wins over then-No. 6 Tennessee and then-No. 11 West Virginia – is gone like a cloud of smoke.
Underperforming as a ranked team has become a disturbing trend for the Gators over the past few seasons. In 2019-20, they opened the season ranked No. 6. They then dropped two of their first four games and fell out of the rankings. They re-entered the rankings after winning their next four games before a loss to Butler dropped them from the polls for good. The 2017-18 team shot up to as high as No. 6 early in the season. They then lost three of their next four games, dropped out of the polls and never rediscovered that magic. Overall, Florida is 11-11 as a ranked team over the last four seasons.
“It’s been tough for us this year,” said guard Tre Mann, who led the Gators on Wednesday with 17 points and eight rebounds. “Every time we get a little bit of success, we tend to come out and play bad and lose focus, and I feel like that’s what happened again tonight. We just weren’t focused. They came out hungry, and they just punked us.”
The statistics certainly support Mann’s claim that they lacked intensity. Despite starting only one player taller than 6-foot-6, the Gamecocks outrebounded the Gators by eight and outscored them 50-30 in the paint. They outscored them by 12 in second-chance points. Offensively, Florida turned it over 12 times, which South Carolina converted into 20 points. All of those stats point to the Gamecocks simply wanting it more and playing with better effort than the Gators.
Coach Mike White, however, refused to make excuses for the performance. He thought the energy level and focus in practice the past few days was similar to where it was leading into the West Virginia game. They simply got beat by a team that played better than them on a given night.
White believes the loss simply exposed something that he thinks has been a weakness all season – man-to-man defense. UF is just an average defensive team, checking in at just 49th in KenPom.com’s advanced defensive metrics entering Wednesday. However, the Gators won some big games because of high-level offensive execution, which made the defensive woes go largely unnoticed by the outside world. They finally had a poor night offensively, shooting just 40 percent and going the final six minutes and 37 seconds without a made field goal. So, their defensive deficiencies finally caught up with them.
“It’s just not good enough,” White said. “We’ve got to take more pride there. This team, this program for a long time has been a high-level defensive program. We took a big drop-off last year, and our numbers right now are about where they were last year. We get off to a decent start at times. There’ll be some spurts within games and even games in their entirety where we’ll say, ‘Damn. We showed what we can be defensively,’ like our last game.”
The Gamecocks lived in the paint all night, with 30 of their 68 shot attempts being layups or dunks. Guard A.J. Lawson made nine of his 16 shots for 22 points, with a large chunk of them coming right at the rim. Guard Seventh Woods scored all 12 of his points in the second half. They shot 46 percent as a team for the game.
“They just hit us in the mouth,” Mann said. “They made winning plays, the plays that we didn’t make. They had the offensive rebounds, they made open shots, and they just got whatever they wanted late second half.”
White is disappointed with the way his team has regressed defensively the past two seasons and challenged himself to find a way to get through to his players and find the winning combinations.
“Very frustrating,” he said. “We’ve subbed about as liberally as we’ve subbed all year. We’re searching for combinations defensively. I’ve got to figure out a way to get these guys a little bit more committed defensively consistently. We see it at times. We do, but we’ve got to see it more often for this team to max out.”
The Gators have been wildly inconsistent in recent years. They’ll often look like a Final Four team, a bubble team and an NIT team within a matter of weeks or even within games at times. That inconsistency reared its ugly head again on Wednesday night, and as a result, the Gators lost to a team that they had no business losing to.
“We’ve got to be the same team all 40 minutes every game and every practice,” White said. “These guys are young, and we’re all human, and do you have a tendency more to relax when things are going really well for you? Yeah, sure. But, that said, we’re trying to do big things here at Florida, and that can’t be a factor. It can’t be an excuse. It doesn’t matter whether we’ve lost two out of three or we’ve won nine in a row. We’ve got to bring it, and I thought South Carolina brought it. And I thought we did some good things, but we’ve got to get better.”
It feels like we’ve lived this day before.