The three-seed Florida Gators (29-7) advanced to the Elite Eight for the third-straight year and seventh time in team history with a 62-50 take down of the 15-seed Florida Gulf Coast Eagles (26-11) in 2013 NCAA Tournament action at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, TX. After the game, head coach Billy Donovan and a number of his players met with the media to discuss what transpired on Friday in the Sweet 16.

UPCOMING OPPONENT

The four-seed Michigan Wolverines (29-7) stunned one-seed Kansas in the first game from Arlington on Friday and advanced to the Elite Eight for the first time since 1994. The Wolverines came from behind to force overtime and eventually took down their foes 87-85 behind 23 points from Trey Burke (all of which came in the second half and overtime). Florida holds a 1-1 record all-time against Michigan, pulling off a 79-63 win in a neutral site game on Dec. 27, 1998. (The teams met previously on March 19, 1988 – a game UF lost 108-85 at a neutral site – but the victory was vacated by the NCAA.)

Sunday’s showdown will commence at 2:20 p.m. (EDT) and air live on CBS. Marv Albert (play-by-play), Steve Kerr (color commentator) and Craig Sager (sideline reporter) will be on the call for the contest.

DIGGING IN AND OUT OF AN EARLY HOLE

Florida opened Friday’s game as cold as a team could be shooting-wise, hitting just four of its first 20 shots while watching FGCU explode out to an early 15-4 lead mostly due to a pair of wide-open three pointers. The Gators not only missed open jumpers but also saw layups roll around the rim without going into the net, an incredibly frustrating situation considering UF was executing its game plan in the early going.

“I felt like we really got a lot of good looks. Obviously the focus was to go down inside to [Erik] Murphy and Patric Young. Those guys had really good looks inside. I thought from the perimeter, I think Mike [Rosario] started off 0-for-5. He had pretty good looks. We couldn’t get anything to fall for us,” Donovan said.

There was no panic from Florida, however. Donovan called a timeout, the Gators composed themselves and got right back in the game in a nick of time.

“I don’t think we panicked at all as a team. We’ve been there before. The main thing with us was starting to get defensive stops. We put together a couple defensive stops. Offense, it wasn’t our best day, but it came along,” senior guard Kenny Boynton said.

Added junior point guard Scottie Wilbekin: “We had a game to win. We had everybody encouraging each other, keeping each other’s head in the right place. When you have that, you’re not going to get that frustrated.”

“We were too determined to win this game so we just fought through, stayed together and picked it up as a whole,” Young concurred. “We had to fight through human nature in the sense of feeling sorry for ourselves that we were down. We really had to fight through. It’s easy to lay down and give up, but we were able to fight as a whole through adversity and stay together.”

Read the rest of the Florida-FGCU post-game (including videos)…
Continue Reading » 3/29: Florida vs. FGCU post-game; Gators set to face Michigan in Elite Eight + videos

Tags: Brett Comer, Casey Prather, Elite Eight, Erik Murphy, Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, Kenny Boynton, Michael Frazier, Michigan Wolverines, Mike Rosario, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Patric Young, Scottie Wilbekin, Sweet 16, Will Yeguete

Despite struggling in the early going and trailing by 11 points late in the first half, the three-seed Florida Gators (29-7) triumphed in a game that was lasted until early Saturday morning and advanced to the Elite Eight for a school-record third-straight season with a 62-50 victory over the 15-seed Florida Gulf Coast Eagles (26-11) at Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, TX.

Florida has now been victorious in its last six appearances in the Sweet 16 and faces a short turnaround as it is set to take on the four-seed Michigan Wolverines in the finals of the South Region of the 2013 NCAA Tournament at 2:20 p.m. on Sunday afternoon.

The Gators used a 16-2 half-ending run to turn an 11-point deficit into a four-point halftime lead and never trailed again. Redshirt senior guard Mike Rosario led the way with a game-high 15 points, team-high five rebounds and three steals and was supported by stellar play from some of UF’s reserves.

FGCU opened up the contest red hot, jumping ahead 15-4 after an 11-0 run as Florida started 2-for-10 from the field and 0-for-5 from downtown.

The Gators’ cold shooting and tight play continued deep into the first half as the Eagles maintained their double-digit lead. Through the first 12:47 of the game, Florida trailed 19-9 while going 4-for-20 from the floor, 0-for-5 from beyond the arc and just 1-for-4 from the free throw line.

Suddenly, the Gators found their shooting stroke and hit three-straight triples including two from freshman guard Michael Frazier II as part of a 16-2 half-ending run that gave them a 30-26 lead at the break. Energy and suffocating defense from junior forwards Casey Prather and Will Yeguete helped UF hold FGCU scoreless for nearly five full minutes and played a big part in its resurgence.

Continue Reading » FG-CU Later: Florida Gators roll into third-straight Elite Eight with 62-50 victory over Eagles

Tags: Brett Comer, Casey Prather, Cowboys Stadium, Elite Eight, Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, Kenny Boynton, Michael Frazier, Michigan Wolverines, Mike Rosario, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Patric Young, Scottie Wilbekin, Sweet 16, Will Yeguete

1 » If you think junior point guard Scottie Wilbekin winding up as a member of the Florida Gators was part of some well-orchestrated plan by head coach Billy Donovan, think again. In this feature on Wilbekin written by USA Today’s Nicole Auerbach, his father reveals that the idea of his son skipping his senior year of high school basically came up on a whim. Luckily for the Gators, Wilbekin joined the team at just the right time and is now a driving force for Florida’s defense as well as its offense as it looks to advance past the Sweet 16 on Friday.

2 » Though OGGOA has taken an extensive look at the college career of redshirt senior guard Mike Rosario, we have not had the opportunity to delve much into what happened before he arrived at Florida as a transfer three years ago. The Newark Star-Ledger’s Matthew Stanmyre penned this feature on Rosario, which notes the impact the has made at the Boys & Girls Club in Jersey City (there is now “an entire bulletin board at the Boys Club devoted to Rosario [filled with] pictures of him” from different points in his career). It also looks at the special relationship he has with assistant coach Rashon Burno whose pictures Rosario used to look at on a similar bulletin board in the Boys Club while growing up. Rosario scored a UF career-high 25 points in the Gators’ round of 32 victory and looks to continue his top-notch play for Florida in the Sweet 16.

3 » Earlier this week, junior center Patric Young spoke with The Gainesville Sun’s Kevin Brockway about his issues on the free throw line. Young, who is now shooting 50.4 percent from the charity stripe this season, was 5-for-6 (.833) from the line last Sunday after going 10-for-27 (.370) over the previous four games. “Your brain can’t tell the difference between don’t miss and miss,” he said. “So if you tell yourself don’t – I have so many different things going through my head, don’t miss, don’t airball, don’t shoot it too hard. My brain is telling me to do those things and it was a big reason why I was struggling.” He continued: “It’s just a matter of my confidence going up there. It felt pretty good knocking down some pretty clutch free throws [on Sunday].”

4 » Fans of the Gators and Florida Gulf Coast Eagles participated in a student spirit segment that aired on NBC‘s TODAY early Friday morning following a feature that was mostly about FGCU’s Cinderella run in the 2013 NCAA Tournament. Check out the clip below for the segment from TODAY. By the angle of the camera, it is pretty easy to tell which team had more fans up at the crack of dawn for the shoot.

Tags: Billy Donovan, Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, Mike Rosario, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Patric Young, Rashon Burno, Scottie Wilbekin, Sweet 16

The three-seed Florida Gators (28-7) advanced to the Sweet 16 of the 2013 NCAA Tournament and will face the (15) Florida Gulf Coast Eagles (26-10) on Friday at 9:57 p.m. live on TBS from Cowboys Stadium in Arlington, TX. On Thursday, both coaches and their players met with the media to discuss Friday’s showdown.

FAMILIARITY MAKES MATCH-UP EVEN BETTER

While on the surface it looks like Florida and FGCU would have no reason to know much about one another, the relationship between the head coaches makes the Gators and Eagles a more intimate match-up than most realize.

In fact, Billy Donovan and Andy Enfield are so familiar with each other that the two discussed running a scrimmage between their teams before the season began, something that obviously did not come to fruition.

“Andy had called me wanting to try to get together to scrimmage. At that time, we were looking at a couple options. They were one,” Donovan explained. “One of the things that I was really looking at as a coach going into our scrimmage was our first game of the year was against Georgetown. Just going against that Princeton style of play – and also having Air Force on our schedule as well – that’s a unique system and style of play that you don’t normally see. At that time, I decided that we needed to play against Rollins in the scrimmage to get us prepared for the Georgetown game.”

Donovan said that as part of the conversation, Enfield bragged about his team and said he expected them to have much-improved chemistry in their third year.

“I know in talking to Andy on the phone, I’m not one bit surprised of the year they’ve had because when I had a conversation with him, he was telling me how really good they were and how special he thought his team could be and that he had a lot of really good players and they were going to have a really good year,” Donovan said. “What they’ve done up to this point in time hasn’t surprised me just based on my conversation with him back in early September and October.”

Enfield is especially familiar with Florida – the team and its players – considering the job he held prior to taking over the FGCU program.

“I was an assistant at Florida State for five years. We played Florida every year. I got to see Coach Donovan, his brilliance, and see what a great coach he was as we prepared for the team,” Enfield said. “He makes adjustments during the year, during the season and even during the game. He’s as good a coach as I’ve ever seen. And the players, I know them personally because I recruited a lot of them while I was at Florida State. They’re terrific young men. I know their families. It’s very ironic that we’re playing Florida in the Sweet 16. I blame this on the Selection Committee. This should be a Final Four game, not a Sweet 16 game. [Laughing]”

GATORS NOT UNDERESTIMATING THE UNDERDOG

Florida is not heading into Friday’s game looking at their opponent as a high seed lucky to have advanced this far. Instead, the Gators see the Eagles as a formidable opponent and have been planning for them as such.

Continue Reading » 3/28: Florida and FGCU prepare for Sweet 16

Tags: Andy Enfield, Billy Donovan, Cowboys Stadium, Erik Murphy, Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, Kenny Boynton, Mike Rosario, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Patric Young, Scottie Wilbekin, Sweet 16

The three-seed Florida Gators and 15-seed Florida Gulf Coast Eagles have been rightfully contrasted in a myriad of ways but what is most pertinent to Friday’s Sweet 16 showdown at Cowboys Stadium is how the teams have been preparing for the game since the first weekend of 2013 NCAA Tournament action concluded last Sunday.

After making history as the first 15-seed in the history of the tournament to advance past the round of 32, the Eagles immediately returned to home to a huge ovation from a student body that may not have known it had a basketball team a week ago. Florida Gulf Coast’s campus was swarmed with local and national media and the team complied with most requests by making its coaching staff and players available to all comers. There was also a now-infamous pep really held as the newly-passionate students chanted an expletive at their upcoming opponents on national television.

“It’s been overwhelming,” head coach Andy Enfield said on Thursday, “but we’ve been trying to do everything we can as a team, as a program, to not only handle the media requests but to promote the program and the school itself. And our players have done an amazing job of that.”

“We took Monday off,” he continued, “and it took us a day and a half to recover mentally and physically. So Tuesday’s practice was just OK. [Wednesday] was better and [Thursday] was better. But it’s all business now. We have a game [Friday] to play. And I’m very appreciative of the job the media has done. We’ve met some terrific people over the last week and a half, two weeks. And I really give the media credit for being so enthusiastic and professional on their coverage of us.”

Continue Reading » While FGCU soaked up well-deserved praise, Florida worked on getting better in Dallas

Tags: Andy Enfield, Billy Donovan, Cowboys Stadium, Erik Murphy, Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, Kenny Boynton, Mike Rosario, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Sweet 16

After coming out of the first weekend of the 2013 NCAA Tournament with two big wins, the three-seed Florida Gators chose to remain in Texas – travelling from Austin, TX to Arlington, TX on Monday – rather than fly home only to be forced to fly back out a few days later. Head coach Billy Donovan has participated in two media availabilities since then and the team has been doing plenty of work on and off the court as well. Here are a few odds and ends that would not fit into some of the other posts here on OGGOA.

» Former Florida center Joakim Noah will be in attendance on Friday. The Chicago Bulls happen to be playing against the Dallas Mavericks on Saturday afternoon, so Noah will be in town and able to attend the Sweet 16 game.

» The Gators had a pair of celebrity visitors as guests in practice this week as Mavericks head coach Rick Carlisle took in the team’s first workout on Tuesday and Texas Rangers catcher A.J. Pierzynski wound up in Cowboys Stadium on Thursday to watch the team’s shootaround. Pierzynski is a life-long UF fan.

» Donovan and Carlisle were both members of the 1987-88 New York Knicks though both were just bench players on the team. Also on that squad? Sidney Green, the father of former Florida point guard Taurean Green. Donovan and Carlisle also played with Patrick Ewing, Kenny “Sky” Walker, Bill Cartwright, Gerald Henderson, Mark Jackson and Gerald Wilkins among others. Donovan and his Gators coaching staff actually went out for dinner with Carlisle and his assistants when Florida got into town on Monday. The Gators then went to the Mavericks game on on Tuesday and saw Dallas pull off an exciting 109-102 win over the Los Angeles Clippers.

» According to Florida Today’s David Jones, junior forward Will Yeguete had been approached in the past to leave Florida early to play professional basketball in France. He declined. “Not happening. My parents want me to graduate,” he said.

» Students from Florida and Florida Gulf Coast will be featured on NBC’s The Today Show on Friday morning. There will be a live spirit competition between the students on a split screen. Gators fans should wear orange, blue and gear with the team logo and arrive at Gate 1 of the Stephen C. O’Connell Center at 6:30 a.m. sharp. The segment will air on NBC at approximately 7:15 a.m.

» Senior guard Kenny Boynton on trying to get to the Final Four after consecutive losses in the Elite Eight: “Basically you need to remember, but you don’t think about it. We remember the pain it caused for us last year. I think we used it to learn for the next few games. We’ve been close, and our goal is to get further this year.”

» Donovan on being forced to suspend junior point guard Scottie Wilbekin before the first game of the season: “I’ll never forget this. It was one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever experienced as a coach when I told him in my office, ‘We’re not taking you on this trip. You’re not playing.’ And all of our team is on the bus and we’re driving to Jacksonville. And he’s got his book bag over his shoulder and our bus is leaving and he’s walking down past our facility to walk back to his dorm. He’s obviously very emotional and he’s crying. I think those kinds of events sometimes really change you. … I think there’s no question that situation with Scottie helped him.”

Continue Reading » Odds and ends from Florida Gators in Texas

Tags: A.J. Pierzynski, Billy Donovan, Cowboys Stadium, John Pelphrey, Kenny Boynton, Matt McCall, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Scottie Wilbekin, Will Yeguete

1 » After the student body of the 15-seed Florida Gulf Coast Eagles chanted “[expletive] the Gators” during a pep really carried live on ESPN, some fans of the three-seed Florida Gators became enraged. To atone for the actions of some of the students, the FGCU student body released the following statement on Tuesday:

“We wanted to take a minute to send you and your students an apology for the negative reaction yesterday during our pep rally. In no manner do the words that were passed yesterday reflect upon this institution of higher education. Often times, excitement and a new experience can cause rash and hasty decisions to be made. In this moment of excitement for our young school, we hope that you will accept our expression of regret. With that being said, we are definitely looking forward to some healthy competition in Arlington, this Friday.”

On Wednesday, Florida’s senior director of media relations, Steve Orlando, responded in kind, according to The Gainesville Sun:

“We certainly understand when students get excited and enthusiastic, but they’ve apologized, and as far as we’re concerned it’s over. We’re just looking forward to a great game in Arlington on Friday.”

2 » In another non-story regarding the Gators and Eagles, FGCU volleyball player Gigi Meyer (the daughter of former Florida head coach Urban Meyer) told reporters on Monday that her father was excited that the Eagles advanced to the Sweet 16 and would be rooting for them over the Gators. Some fans expectantly overreacted for no good reason whatsoever, and The Sun‘s Pat Dooley went out of his way to communicate with Meyer (who also donates time and money to Florida Gulf Coast) to get his thoughts on the situation. “Always a Gator,” Meyer said. “Billy [Donovan]‘s my friend. That was Camelot the year I went to Indianapolis (2006) and they won it.”

3 » Speaking of Donovan, it was announced Wednesday that he is one of 20 finalists for the Jim Phelan National Coach of the Year Award, which is presented annually to the nation’s top Division I coach. Donovan has never won the award, which has been handed out since 2002-03, but was named the ESPN.com National Coach of the Year in 2011 and received the John R. Wooden Legends of Coaching Award in 2010.

4 » The Football Writers Association of America on Wednesday announced that Florida head coach Will Muschamp will be the keynote speaker for the 2013 Bronko Nagurski Awards Banquet on Dec. 9. The Nagurski Award, which is handed out to the top defensive player in college football this year, has been in existence since 1993 yet never been won by a Gators player.

Tags: Billy Donovan, Florida Gulf Coast Eagles, Gigi Meyer, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Sweet 16, Urban Meyer, Will Muschamp

In an effort to provide an additional perspective on the three-seed Florida Gators 78-64 victory over the Minnesota Golden Gophers this past Sunday, OGGOA reached out to former Florida team manager Kyle Gilreath, who now works for Fast Model Sports and runs an interesting basketball blog Words on the Bounce. Gilreath diagrammed two plays that worked quite well for the Gators against the Gophers on Sunday during the 2013 NCAA Tournament and outlined the situations below. (Next season, OGGOA hopes to have video to accompany similar features.)

Gap: Florida ran this zone offense action several times in the first half and ended up with wide open three-pointers nearly every time head coach Billy Donovan called the play. The Gators start with three guards around the perimeter and two big men along the baseline behind the zone. Junior point guard Scottie Wilbekin offsets the ball with a dribble and post as the option to flash to the mid-post area. On the catch, junior center Patric Young had three options: (1) attack the rim, (2) look for senior forward Erik Murphy with a high-low pass if he seals X4, or (3) kick it out for an open three-pointer if the zone packs in to prevent the easy layup.

15 Spread: Florida was badly hurting Minnesota with its pick-and-roll / pick-and-pop, so Gophers head coach Tubby Smith decided to start switching all ball screens in the second half. Once this happened, Donovan responded by spreading the floor and took advantage of Minnesota’s strategy. With four players outside of the perimeter, Young sprinted into a middle pick-and-roll. The Gophers switched, which led to a mismatch not only inside with Young but this also left a big man guarding Wilbekin up top. This gave the Gators two options which they went to down the stretch: (1) Wilbekin attacked the big one-on-one to get to the rim (if the defense helped on the penetration, he found Young inside or shooters spotting up in the corner) and (2) Wilbekin also threw back to the other ball-side guard who would then look to feed Young down low.

And then, of course, Wilbekin and junior F Casey Prather also connected on their second alley-oop in as many games. While Gainesville, FL may not be “Dunk City,” Wilbekin and Murphy have put up their share of highlights this season including a half-court alley-oop in Florida’s second-round take down of Northwestern State.

Animated GIF created for OnlyGators.com by photekxl.

Tags: Billy Donovan, Casey Prather, Erik Murphy, Minnesota Golden Gophers, NCAA, NCAA Tournament, Patric Young, Scottie Wilbekin, Tubby Smith