By Eric Fawcett
Hello Gator fans! I hope this newsletter finds you well and I hope you, as well as your family and friends are safe and healthy.
Basketball season may be finished, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped thinking about Florida basketball and here are five things that are on my mind.
1. If I had to guess who Florida wants the most in the transfer market, it’s Long Beach State’s Joshua Morgan.
I wrote about this at Gator Country in a bit more detail, but it’s clear the Gators are looking to improve their center position whether it’s an instantly eligible grad transfer or it’s a true transfer for depth down the line.
The thing about the available grad transfers is that, well…none of them really appeal to me. The instantly eligible bigs Florida has reached out to like Kevin Marfo (Quinnipiac) and Dwight Wilson (James Madison) are excellent rebounders but they are plodders who would struggle defensively, and I just can’t see White wanting to take rebounding at the expense of defense.
By far and away the player I am most interested in that the Gators have reached out to is Joshua Morgan, a freshman who Florida played against earlier in the season. He is everything you want from a true transfer target, a player with raw skills and an underdeveloped physique that could both be improved drastically with a redshirt season. The 6’10” center showed great flashes as both a shot blocker defensively and a finisher around the rim offensively and I think he’d definitely be a contributor if the Gators landed him.
He is a California kid and he’ll have all the west coast schools after him so it might be a challenge for the Gators to get him, but I’d have to guess he’s a priority at the moment.
2. Has Florida been too reliant on transfers in the Mike White era?
I had to bring this up because it has been a discussion on the Gator Country forums recently and it’s an interesting topic. Florida has brought in a lot of transfers in the last few years… and they have also lost a lot of players to the portal. This has some fans angered, suggesting that always bringing in new players from other schools and losing guys that went to Florida out of high school is not a way to build a program.
I can understand this sentiment, and I suppose in a perfect world you would always recruit the perfect players that would stay at Florida for four years and have productive careers, but that simply isn’t the reality and the modern college basketball player is far more likely to want to dabble in multiple programs than players, say, a decade ago.
Let’s also remember that Florida is recruiting the caliber of players that are likely to leave as underclassmen, and if they stay on that trajectory it’s going to be tough for them to ever get old and experienced unless they bring in transfers. Additionally, Florida has had great success with graduate transfers and I’m not sure why you wouldn’t want to keep that going. Yes, Kerry Blackshear Jr. didn’t end up quite as productive as some people expected but he was still one of the better centers in college basketball, and they have had success with Egor Koulechov and Canyon Barry too.
I’ll say this, I am really high on Tyree Appleby and Anthony Duruji, so if you’re someone who doesn’t like the idea of using too many transfers, I’d suggest you wait until you see these two players play because they might change your tune.
3) Florida’s coaching staff has a lot of decisions when it comes to how they want to play offense next season.
Offense hasn’t exactly come easily to the Gators in the Mike White tenure and an interesting chapter of the Florida basketball book was written when White decided to scrap the dribble drive offense the team started the season with to play a more structured style.
White’s Louisiana Tech teams were all about the dribble drive offense and it’s something he tried to bring to Florida, but without a lot of success—yet.
I say “yet” because there is a chance next season’s team could be more suited to the offense, starting with the activation of Tyree Appleby. You see, to run the dribble drive effectively you need multiple players on the perimeter that are threats to score off the bounce. With Andrew Nembhard and Noah Locke in the backcourt, that hasn’t been the case. Nothing against those players, who I truly love, but their skillsets weren’t at all geared towards the dribble drive and they were much better suited to the more structured offense the team used at the end of the season. With Appleby the Gators have a player with the required shimmy and shake to pressure defenses with the dribble. He’s a fantastic individual scorer, and his ability to get dribble drives could be what makes the offense work.
However, like I said earlier, you need multiple scorers to make this offense effective, not just one like Appleby.
So, Florida’s staff will have a lot of tough decisions as they decide what to play. Do they try the dribble drive again, or do they keep the structured offense that they used most of this past season. Or, with a whole offseason, do they try something totally different?
Let’s also remember that Florida’s structured Princeton-style offense they were running required Kerry Blackshear Jr. to be a distributor in the high post, and obviously he’s gone. Do they trust Omar Payne or Jason Jitoboh in that role? Maybe, but I’d anticipate some tweaks.
4) The SEC is going to be better next season.
The league was down this past season, something that I thought would ensure the Gators could win it, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.
It’s worth noting that this likely won’t be the case next season and the league is going to be back to being extremely difficult. I’ll rattle this off quickly without any comments as that would take a while and would get too into the weeds, but in my opinion the list of teams that are going to be better this season than next season is:
Kentucky
LSU
Tennessee
Arkansas
Alabama
Georgia
Texas A&M
And the teams that I think will be noticeably not as good are:
Mississippi State
And maaaybe Auburn? But they’re bringing in a 5-star recruit and have stayed good, so we’ll see.
Anyways, as you can see, the SEC was down for a year and is going to be back to dominance again in 2020-21. A lot of this is driven by the fact the league is recruiting at an extremely high level and they also have arguably the best group of coaches in the country.
If you’re someone who found yourself not getting as excited as you normally do for Florida’s league games this year the story should be totally different this time around. There should be a ton of ranked opponents in league play and if the Gators aren’t ready they could get smacked around a bit.
On a positive note, the Gators are going to have every opportunity to put together a great resume and hopefully this won’t be a year where they dabble in the bubble conversation, hopefully they are in the NCAA Tournament picture easily.
5) Watch out for one of Florida’s assistants taking a head job somewhere.
A year ago, every single one of Florida’s assistants received interest for low or mid major head coaching jobs and that will likely be the case again this year.
This is especially the case with Darris Nichols and Jordan Mincy. Every program in the country wants young coaches who can recruit and that’s exactly what these two are capable of, so expect to hear their names tossed around in job talks this summer.
I really wanted to stay away from anything Covid-19 related and I made it to thought five, but it has to be noted that the state of things will likely make teams less likely to want to make a coaching change this summer. I don’t think any team would be excited to try and make a change given the current situation, and bringing in a new coach would be difficult considering that the new coach would have a whale of a time trying to recruit to a new program exclusively over the phone. Additionally, the fact many conference tournaments were cancelled means that there are a lot of coaches on the hot seat that could play the “what if” card to give themselves more time.
Considering the interest that Florida’s assistants got a year ago it wouldn’t be shocking at all to see one of them leave this summer, so it’s something to keep an eye on.
Thanks for sharing some of your time with me! Be safe and go Gators!