Saturday afternoon’s game between Florida and Ole Miss will pit two teams dealing with extreme adversity against each other.
The Gators (14-8, 4-5 SEC) are having to learn how to play without a low-post threat on either end of the floor with Colin Castleton (left shoulder) and Jason Jitoboh (eye surgery) unavailable. Jitoboh returned to the practice facility on Friday for the first time since his scary injury at Tennessee last week.
And, of course, the best player on their roster, Keyontae Johnson, has basically served as a student assistant coach all season as he weighs his options following his collapse at Florida State in 2020.
Ole Miss, meanwhile, has won three out of its last four games, including a road upset at No. 25 LSU on Tuesday. However, star point guard Daeshun Ruffin, the first McDonald’s All-American to ever sign with the school, suffered a season-ending knee injury in that game.
As the coaching cliché goes, nobody is going to feel sorry for the Gators or the Rebels. Their opponents are going to want to beat them just as badly regardless of their unfortunate circumstances. Whoever handles the adversity better will have the inside track to a victory inside the O’Connell Center on Saturday.
“We better be right with our mentality if we’re going to be competitive with Ole Miss, who is coming off maybe their biggest win of the year at LSU,” UF coach Mike White said. “They have some adversity going on as well but a heck of a finish for those guys [against LSU].”
The Gators will be looking to avoid another performance like the one that they turned in when the teams met in Oxford last week. In that one, UF went a woeful 4-for-29 from three-point land and gave up 52 percent shooting in an ugly 70-54 loss to one of the SEC’s weakest teams.
The Gators had Jitoboh in that game, and they still hoisted 29 threes. With the big man not available this time around, they figure to be even more reliant on perimeter shooting. They’ll need to figure out how to solve the conference’s second-best three-point defense.
White said that the Rebels’ terrific three-point defense actually starts in the interior with Nysier Brooks, who is seventh in the league with 1.2 blocked shots per game and fourth in rebounds with eight per game. With that kind of a security net lurking under the rim, they can be more aggressive with challenging perimeter shots.
“We have to try to mix up what we’re doing offensively,” White said. “They’ve got great team speed, really quick and fast. They have good depth and play hard and have that anchor on the interior, a guy who can clean things up if they do run you off the line or close out incorrectly or beat you off the bounce. Those are the factors that make them good in terms of defending the three.
“I thought we were really stagnant, really tentative against their zone, and they’re going to throw at least a couple different zones at us [Saturday]. So, we’ve just got to adjust better, play with more confidence. We’ve got a couple guys that are in more of a better groove right now offensively. Hopefully that carries over to [Saturday].”
It would help the Gators if Myreon Jones can carry over what he did against Missouri on Wednesday. He made five of his first six three-point shots in the first half and finished with 18 points, his most since scoring 20 points in the opener against Elon.
His hot shooting led to a 10-for-23 day from three overall for the Gators, their best performance from deep this season. And even with that kind of shooting, it still took a come-from-behind effort in the final minutes to win. That’s the style of play that the Gators are going to have to utilize without their two centers.
“It felt pretty good,” Jones said. “It felt pretty cool seeing how excited my team was and kind of got us going, but I was really just excited about the win more than my success, actually.
“I knew eventually it was going to start falling for me. I didn’t know when, but my teammates and coaches kept telling me to shoot it. They believed in me. They’ve been my biggest supporters through it, and I just appreciate them a lot.”
Another challenge will be to adjust to the new-look Ole Miss team on the fly. The Rebels ran everything through Ruffin, who averaged 12.6 points, 3.4 assists and 2.3 steals per game. He dropped 21 points on Florida in the first meeting.
With him out, Ole Miss (12-10, 3-6) will have to tweak their schemes on both ends of the court. What those changes will be are anybody’s guess until the game gets underway.
“It’ll be interesting to see how every team responds to those type things, what they do offensively, defensively,” White said. “They’ve got other guys that are playing really well, and they played well against us. They’ve got other options. They’ve got other very good players. They’ve got good actions. They’ll execute, and they’ll defend, and that’s probably a bigger thing for us in terms of corrections from Oxford. We scored [54] points. We’ve got to score more than that to be competitive.”
The Gators will also have to do a much better job of closing out on Matthew Murrell after he scored 20 points on 8-for-12 shooting (3-for-6 from deep) in the first meeting. He’s shooting 38.5 percent from beyond the arc for the season.
UF’s frontcourt will face a stiff challenge in this one. Jaemyn Brakefield is one of Ole Miss’ top three-point shooters at 37.7 percent, and Brooks is a powerful man under the basket. They’ll have to somehow limited both of them with a small and undersized group of players.
Florida and Ole Miss have both gone through some significant adversity of late, but one of them will exit the arena on Saturday with a much better outlook on things.