Florida head coach Todd Golden met with the media on Monday afternoon to discuss their Saturday loss to Tennessee and preview Tuesday’s date with Vanderbilt.
Here’s everything Golden had to say:
On Walter Clayton’s injury status:
“Yeah, I think obviously we avoided anything too serious, which is awesome. He definitely tweaked his ankle pretty good there in the first half. Second half, slipped in front of our bench. I don’t think there was anything added on because of that. Just kind of a fluky deal. Obviously, he’s been knocking out his rehab and is recovering. He’s moving around pretty well, but we’ll take it hour by hour right now and see how it goes this afternoon in practice. I think tomorrow when he wakes up will be a big determinant in if he goes tomorrow night or not.”
On whether Tennessee game was a fluke:
“They’re pretty dang good, man; it can happen. You go into a road venue, a top-10 venue. Obviously, probably the expectation with Zakai [Zeigler] being out, game time and then [Igor] Milicic and it’s like, ‘Oh, man, they’re super undermanned.’ They have some really good players, and they’re a really good program. The physicality in which they played with was apparently too much for us to overcome. And I thought we did a good job fighting the first half. We couldn’t make a shot. To go into halftime only down three, with Walt kind of going down right before halftime, I thought we did a good enough job keeping ourselves in the game. But they came out and scored on three or four of the first couple possessions in the second half and built that 10-point lead. The way I spoke about them after our first game being a run football team showed up against us in the second half as well. They got that lead, and we just could not crawl our way back into the game. We didn’t do well enough offensively to create better shots. I still thought we should have shot the ball a little bit better. We didn’t rebound well enough. We didn’t give ourselves extra possessions that way. And we turned it over a little too much. So it’s a bad combination of all those things coming together at the same time. I thought Tennessee played with really, really, a lot of grit in terms of their mentality and the way they wanted to control the game. It’s been an area that we’ve been able to do most of most of our contests this year: control and dictate what goes on out there. And we just weren’t able to on Saturday. So we tip our cap to them. Obviously they played pretty freaking well, and we weren’t on our best. But I’m excited to get back out there tomorrow night for sure.”
On the Tennessee loss serving as a better test for handling adversity:
“I don’t think it’s that different. Obviously it was a wider margin. But when you play 31 games, and a lot of those games are against top-25 teams, it’s within the range of outcomes that can happen, especially when you’re 4 for 27 from 3 or whatever we were. If we make a couple more, it might be under 10 and it’s a tighter game. We talked about it yesterday a lot, though. We just can’t let it bleed into this next game against Vanderbilt. It’s a really good team coming in, a team that’s beat Kentucky, a team that’s beat Tennessee. They’ve shown the ability to win some big games, and we just got to play well tomorrow. They’re a good club, and they’re hard to guard. And we just can’t allow our performance on Saturday to bleed into tomorrow night.”
On confidence level of Denzel Aberdeen, Isaiah Brown, Urban Klavzar, etc, if Walter Clayton can’t go:
“I’m very confident that they’ll be able to step up if we need them. You know, they’re great players, they’re very good players, and obviously our rotation has been tight. We’ve been healthy, and things have been going pretty well, so there hasn’t been a need necessarily to stretch that out. But if, you know, we need extended minutes from Urby, Zay or even Kajus [Kublickas], you know, I think those guys will be able to lift up a little bit if we need them to.”
On the benefit of last week’s ‘bye’:
“Well, it got us healthy up until Walt twisted his ankle in the first half on Saturday. But yeah, I mean, we were just fresh, you know, got back healthy. We didn’t play great on Saturday, you know, so it’s like you don’t necessarily feel the benefits in the moment, but I think it was still really important for us. We had some other guys that were a little nicked up, and they were able to get through that week and get back healthy. And, you know, I think the benefits we might not see until, you know, maybe a week or two down the road, as opposed to what happened on Saturday. But I stick by it. I think it was good timing for us to, you know, get a midweek bye and be able to recalibrate a little bit.”
On preventing the team from looking ahead to Auburn:
“That certainly won’t be an issue for me, I can promise you that. I don’t think it will be for the guys either, simply because, you know, we have a lot of respect for Vanderbilt. We have a lot of respect for, you know, Coach [Mark] Byington. One of our staff members, Jordan Talley, worked with him at JMU. You know, I respect him a lot because we had similar paths of getting to the league, you know, working at a mid-major program and having some success and being able to come to the SEC, and they run good stuff. He’s a really good coach. So, you know, if we don’t play well tomorrow night, it won’t be because we’re looking past Vanderbilt. It’ll simply be because we didn’t perform as well as we want to. Like, they’re a very good program. Our guys understand that.”
On Sam Alexis, getting post players more touches:
“I thought Sam finished well early in the game. I’m not sure I’d call [Felix] Okpara smaller than him – Okpara is a pretty big guy. But yeah, we throw it in the lot for the guys in the post. We do that quite a bit. If we feel like it’s a good matchup for us, we’ll try to exploit that. I think one of the reasons why we’ve been so effective offensively is because all five guys out there are able to make plays and to take advantage of whether it’s guards playing the ball screen or driving close-outs, bigs going against one-on-one coverage in the post, whatever it is. So yeah, we’ll continue to try to get the ball inside when it calls for that. And obviously we want to be more effective on the perimeter than we were on Saturday.”
On halftime adjustments vs Tennessee:
“Again, we played pretty physical in the first half. Didn’t make a shot. We did not make shots at the beginning of the second half, they did, and they got a little bit of a lead and it just kind of stuck in that 10-point range the rest of the game. I wasn’t pleased with how we finished the game, defensively. We laid on a couple screens, gave up a couple 3-pointers to [Chaz] Lanier. The game was a little out of reach by then. It was just an inability to be able to make shots and stay in the game that way.”
On Vanderbilt’s guards:
“I thought they did a great job of getting, not lesser-name guys but maybe lesser-publicized guys out of the portal, right? [Jason] Edwards is a very, very good scorer. Quick, hard to stay in front of, hard to stop. He makes really tough shots. He reminds me a lot of Kahlil Shabazz, the guy we had in San Francisco with his ability to scorer when he’s guarded. An open shot is pretty much the same as a contested shot for him. [A.J.] Hoggard is just a really good addition. A guy who has won a lot of games at a really good program at Michigan State Tough. Understands how to win. [Tyler] Nickel on the perimeter is another guy on the perimeter that can drill shots. I think it’s a pretty big correlation when he’s making 3s and when they’ve been successful in the league. He went out and was able to get these different guys and what’s impressive is just the way they play together, play for each other and be able to beat those teams we referred to earlier that have a better reputation. They’re a really good team. There’s a reason why if the tournament was tomorrow they’d probably be in the field. They’re good. So, yeah, he’s done a really good job in the first year just plugging these pieces together and playing on the same page.”
On the Gators’ emotions after the loss:
“Disappointed. Frustrated. It’s why I think this group has a chance to have a special year. We didn’t let it bleed into yesterday. I thought we had a good morale about us. We broke down the game well and just got back on our feet. I expect us to have a great practice today. It’s tough to win games in this league. You look at the big picture on Saturday, I definitely better going to bed and seeing nine teams in the top 15 or whatever it was lose. Some lost by double figures at home to unranked teams. Winning is very hard. We’ve grown to expect our team to win every night, which is a great place to be and shown some great growth in our program. We got knocked on our butt Saturday and have to make sure it doesn’t happen Tuesday night.”
On what dictates the will and tempo of the team:
“It’s collective. Everybody has different responsibilities for it to happen. Yeah, we want our guards pushing. We want our guards flying the ball up the floor. But if your bigs aren’t rim-running and putting pressure on the rim that push is not going to be as effective. There’s a lot of collectiveness to the process working. Again, we’ve been able to dictate a lot in these games. We got no transition on Saturday. Tennessee made a concerted effort to not let us get easy baskets that way. We tried to do what we did and they did what they did better than we did. We just have to do it a little better tomorrow night.”