Todd Golden knew he had a good team. The Florida coach didn’t know how good it would be, but he knew he had a good team.
“I think we’re really mature. I think we play really hard and I think we’re really unselfish,” he said before the season on Florida’s athletic website. “Those three things specifically are kind of our identity. People who have been in our gym see the level of competitiveness on a day-to-day basis. I think we are really consistent that way,” Golden added.
“We have a lot of work to do,” he continued, “but the bones of our foundation are strong. We shoot the ball well. We’re athletic. We run well. We play hard. At the end of the day, as long as our guys compete, I’ll be OK and live with whatever happens,” Golden declared.
Going into the final week of the regular season, and with two games left to play, Golden’s Gators are gunning for a No. 1 seed in the NCAA tournament. Florida is 25-4, 12-4 in conference play, and has a key matchup in Tuscaloosa Wednesday against Alabama, the nation’s seventh-ranked team. The Gators, by the way, are ranked No. 5. They then close the season against Ole Miss in Gainesville before competing in the SEC tournament.
The emergence of the Gators as one of the best in college basketball is truly amazing, and has established Golden as one of the bright young coaches in the game. Now in his third year at the helm, Golden has resurrected Florida .
In his first year, 2022-23, Golden got his feet on the ground and posted a 16-17 record. But he was 9-9 in the SEC and got to the NIT, where the Gators lost to another state school, Central Florida.
Then last year the program turned around, giving Golden a sense that the team was on the way up. Florida rebounded to 24-12, was 11-7 in the SEC and made the NCAA tournament, where it lost, 102-100, to Colorado in the first round. It was Florida’s best record in seven years, and it indicated But the stage was set for the Gators to elbow their way back onto the national scene, a place they hadn’t been since the Billy Donovan era, which was highlighted by Florida’s two straight NCAA championships in 2006 and 2007.
The SEC has long been known for its prowess in football, and it has taken a while for basketball to gain a legitimate foothold in the conference, but the league has come a long way since the Adolph Rupp era at Kentucky, when the Wildcats, a perennial national power, ruled along with Tennessee and Vanderbilt.
Once, after one of his nationally ranked Kentucky teams had been shocked by Florida in its cracker box gym, a frustrated Rupp said he’d burn the place down if he had a match, “except it isn’t worth the price of a box of matches.”
Back then, basketball was an after thought, played in gyms that were little better then the high school facilities most of the players were used to. Basketball was primarily a diversion to pass time between the end of football in the fall and the start of football in the spring.
No more. In recent years, SEC basketball has exploded, with new coliseums replacing the roll-our bleachers and top end talent from all over the country filling the rosters. Old, venerable conferences like the ACC and Big East are giving way to the new-look SEC, which has eight – count ’em, eight – teams in the most recent AP top 25 including No. 1 Auburn and three of the top five.
And right there in the middle of all this, mixing it up with the best of them, are Golden’s Gators. How good are they? Well, like Golden said before the season started, he knew he had a good team, he just wasn’t sure how good it was. And that still applies. Florida has beaten Auburn and lost to Georgia, which is mediocre at best.
But this team has the potential to beat anyone. Florida appears to have fixed it’s defense, it’s biggest problem a year ago when it scored 85.6 points a game but allowed 79.2. That’s down to 67.2 now and the renewed emphasis on defense hasn’t hurt the offense a bit with the Gators averaging 83.2 points per contest.
The offense is driven by one of the best point guards in the country, Polk County’s Walter Clayton. Clayton played for Bartow and then went to Iona before transferring to Florida. He’s Florida’s leading scorer, averaging 16.9 points per game, and has 113 assists.
The defensive turnaround has been led by 6-foot-10, 255-pound Reuben Chinyelu, a transfer from Washington State who has given the Gators a dominating presence at the rim, especially when combined with 6-foot-11, 230-pound Alex Condon. Condon had 45 blocked shots last year and was named to the SEC’s all-freshman team.
So right now, it’s all good for the Gators. They must get past Alabama and then Ole Miss and rise to the occasion in the SEC tournament, and that’s a tall order, but if they can pull it off, a No.1 seed in the NCAA tourney is likely theirs.
And even if they don’t wind up with a top seed, they still have the talent to contend for the championship. Even Adolph Rupp would have to admit that.

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