While it wasn’t always pretty and the Gators needed to fight through some major adversity (more on that shortly), Tuesday’s game ended up as a lopsided Florida victory with them grabbing a nice resume win on the road at #22 ranked Mississippi State. This game was an all out slugfest for the first half but in the second Florida took complete control, rattling off a 17-0 run to take a gigantic lead, one that they held onto until the final buzzer, winning 81-68. Florida will be ecstatic with the toughness it took to win this game, but they’ll hope to be at full strength when they move on to South Carolina on Saturday. With the win, Florida improves to 21-3 on the season and 8-3 in the SEC.
Early Adversity
Just thirty seconds into the game Florida was inbounding from Mississippi State’s baseline and a pass was floated in to Alex Condon. Being tightly guarded by his man, Condon leaped to secure the pass, and when he did he came down awkwardly stepping on the foot of the defender, awkwardly bending his ankle in the wrong direction. He immediately fell to the ground in considerable pain, but was able to eventually hobble off to the locker room with some assistance from Florida’s medical staff. Condon has been one of the most important Gators this season and is coming off an incredible performance against Auburn, and losing him on essentially the first possession of the game could have been devastating for Florida, particularly as they were already playing without Alijah Martin who was kept out with an injury. Despite being down two starters the Gators were able to win comfortably, and Denzel Aberdeen led the team with 20 points in Martin’s absence. Currently, no diagnosis on Condon has been made public, and the team will hope that the injury isn’t as bad as it may have appeared.
Leading The Way
With Alex Condon missing the entire game outside of a single possession, sophomore Thomas Haugh was ready to step up. Of course, like Condon he also had a tremendous game against Auburn and was ready to keep the momentum going and he was all over the place once again grabbing rebounds, knocking down threes, and finding open teammates with pinpoint passes. Ultimately he stuffed the stat sheet with 16 points, 9 rebounds, 8 assists to flirt with a triple double, while also throwing in an impressive 2 steals and 2 blocks to show his impact on the defensive end. After the Auburn game it would have been easy to argue that Haugh played the best game of his career, but he decided to make it an argument with how he played against Mississippi State with an all-around performance that led the Gators on both sides of the floor.
Focused D
In recent weeks the Gators had lost a little bit of their edge defensively and it came back in a big way against Auburn and showed up once again against Mississippi State where the Gators frustrated the Bulldogs and forced them into 15 turnovers and 41% shooting from the field. What made Florida’s defense most impressive was the fact that they were able to make a major adjustment in the middle of the game. Early on Mississippi State was cutting the Gators up with short rolls in the pick and roll game allowing their bigs to catch the ball in the middle of the floor to make a subsequent play. Florida changed up the way that they were tagging these rollers by engaging the higher player on the side that had two, and they were able to clean up their defense on these possessions. This completely short circuited the Bulldogs attack and they didn’t seem to have a counter punch, at least not one they could come to in time as the Gators ran away with the second half. Going into Tuesday’s game Mississippi State was a top-20 offense according to KenPom but the Gators were able to neutralize them.
Final Thoughts
This was an ugly game that had the feel of many of the SEC contests between 2015-2023 but the Gators found a way to win despite going in without their starting shooting guard and unexpectedly losing a star post player just thirty seconds into the game. Not only did they find a way to win, but they did it with relative ease, leading by as much as twenty four in the second half. Winning ugly is an important skill in the SEC and the Gators passed that test with flying colors. They’ll now have another winnable game when they head back to Gainesville to take on South Carolina on Saturday.