Now that the season is roughly halfway through, it’s time to take a look at where the Gators sit in terms of NCAA Tournament resume and see where they sit on the national landscape.
Certainly, somebody is going to read this and think it’s far too early to look at bracketology, and they would be entitled to that opinion. Looking at data from recent years, midway bracketology has had a pretty good indication of what the NCAA Tournament ends up looking like a few months later, and even if there are crazy changes, it’s still worth looking at how the Gators fared in the non-conference and where it places them against similar teams.
Someone who thinks that it’s too early to look at projected brackets may argue their point by suggesting that there is so much season to be played that the non-conference doesn’t matter a ton, and to that I’ll say…we’ll see. Florida’s first game of the SEC season was postponed and may end up as a cancellation, and it wasn’t the only SEC game that was cancelled on the conference’s opening day. We can’t be sure that every game on the schedule is going to be played, and therefore Florida may not end up having as many resume building opportunities as they would have in a normal season.
The place that every NCAA Tournament projection needs to start is the NET Rankings, the official sorting and evaluation tool of the Selection Committee.
In this metric, the Gators currently rank 51st, one spot ahead of Iona.
That, unfortunately, is not a good number.
In the brief history of the NET, you generally want to be in the low thirties or higher if you want to ensure an at-large birth to the Big Dance. There have been some teams lower, and even into the 50’s, that have made the NCAA Tournament with an at-large bid, but generally those have been Mountain West or Atlantic 10 teams–not high major ones. So, that number alone suggests the Gators have some work to do.
The way that the NCAA uses the NET is to evaluate games in a four quadrant system with quadrant-1 being top level games, the kinds of wins that help your resume and the kind of losses that don’t really sting you, and quadrant-4 being the wins that don’t really move the needle and the losses that can hurt.
Here is Florida’s record by quadrant:
Q-1: 1-1
Q-2: 1-0
Q-3: 1-1
Q-4: 6-1
What we’re seeing on Florida’s resume, or “Team Sheet” as it’s called by the NCAA, is not a lot of high quality wins, and a couple of pretty bad losses. The win over Ohio State stands as Florida’s only quad-1 win as Florida State has unfortunately struggled which lowered the value of the win. With Oklahoma playing some pretty good basketball, and Florida playing them on the road, that loss currently stands as a quad-1 loss which doesn’t look bad by any means.
Their other two losses, however, are not so pleasant, especially the quad-4 loss to Texas Southern that sticks out like a sore thumb.
How bad was this loss, exactly?
Well, Florida is the highest ranked NET team to have a quad-4 loss, so there aren’t any teams that they’ll be battling for seeding with that have taken such a crushing black eye to their resume.
It’s also worth noting that last year, there wasn’t a single at-large NCAA Tournament team that took a quad-4 loss all season.
In fact, in the three years of NET ratings, only one at-large NCAA Tournament team has had a quad-4 loss*.
*This was Kentucky in 2020, and while there was no SEC Tournament for them to win or technically an NCAA Tournament bracket to be selected for, they would have made it as an at-large, so I’m counting them as the only team so far in NET history to take a quad-4 loss and be an at-large team. Had they won the SEC that year, then this number would be zero.
So, what the Gators are now trying to do–make an NCAA Tournament after losing a quad-4 game, is rather unprecedented. Of course, this is only the fourth year of the NET, so it’s not like they’re trying to swim upstream against decades of history or anything, but it does speak to just how bad the Texas Southern loss was. It also shows that they don’t have much wiggle room to take that many more bad losses since they already suffered such an ugly one.
The Maryland defeat didn’t help things at all, as it is currently a quad-3 loss (the Terrapins are 112th in the NET) which is also quite bad. If it was Florida’s only bad loss of the non-conference schedule it wouldn’t be debilitating, but after the Gators already lost to Texas Southern, they don’t have much leeway to take bad losses and the Maryland game was just that. Of the 50 teams ahead of the Gators in the NET, only 8 of them have taken a quad-3 loss. This shows that the Gators have now taken two losses worse than most of their peers, and that’s not something you want to hear as it relates to the NCAA Tournament.
This article was to be about bracketology, so let’s talk brackets.
Instead of looking at one or two prognosticator’s brackets, it’s preferable to look at a composite of all the best bracketologists. Bracket Matrix is considered to be the best composite tool, bringing together 38 of the most accurate bracketologists to get an average of their work, making for what has historically been a very accurate look at where teams sit.
In Bracket Matrix, Florida is…
…a 10-seed. Specifically, the second highest 10-seed. This suggests that there are 8 at-large teams below the Gators that still made it, so the Gators have a bit of wiggle room, but not a whole bunch.
Of the 38 brackets, one had the Gators 6th, by far the highest, while four had the Gators missing the tournament.
As things currently stand, Florida is not where they want to be and they’re not sitting in a great position. While they’re currency one the right side of the bubble, that could burst quickly–especially in the current climate.
The worst case scenario would be something like this. Florida has home games against Vanderbilt and Georgia, which would be quad-3 threes, likely. Say Colin Castleton, Phlandrous Fleming, and Tyree Appleby are all out due to health and safety protocols, but the game still gets played. That could end up being another bad loss, and one that the Gators can’t afford.
Of course, while some cancellations might be imminent, it’s still the SEC and the Gators will have quality games remaining to improve their position. They’d love to get off the hamster wheel that has been a perennial 7-10 seed, and if they go on a run in the SEC, that’s possible.
We’re not sure when Florida will get to play basketball next but when they do they’ll have little room for error, but plenty of room for upward trajectory.