Todd Golden and the Florida Gators got tested in a way the team hasn’t been tested for a long time, but they battled back to advance to the Sweet 16 with a 77-75 win against 2-time defending national champion UConn.
Walter Clayton Jr. had 23 points, and helped propel the Gators on a 28-14 run in the second half to help the team erase a 6-point deficit in the 2nd half.
After the game, the Gators coach talked about the resiliency and mindset of his team.
“Just to stay the course. We were — a lot of it had to do with UConn, but we were doing some uncharacteristic things that we simply haven’t done for a long time,” Golden said. “We were loose with the ball in the first half. We didn’t rebound great. Those are kind of the hallmarks of our program that make us consistent and raise our floor.”
While he thought the Gators made some mistakes in that stretch, Golden said a lot of their issues were because of the play of UConn.
“Again, I thought UConn did a good job bothering us that way,” Golden said. “Second half, we got off to a decent start and then they pull away. I think it got up to seven and six, I guess. That was their biggest lead. They kept it for — and we couldn’t seem to push through and get on top of them. We were down by two to three at the under 4 media. It’s now or never, man, if we can’t find a way to pull back out in front these next few minutes, then we’re going home.”
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With 3:28 remaining in the game, the Gators trailed the Huskies 61-58 going into the timeout. This is when Clayton got hot, scoring 8 points in just over 2 minutes to give the team a 6-point lead. While that is getting much of the talk, there were some key hustle plays by the Gators that Golden believes played just as big of role in the win.
“We just had some guys step up and making some huge winning plays down the stretch,” Golden said. “Obviously what Walter did out of the ball screen hitting the 3. But the free throw and offensive rebounds, I think Alijah poked one out to Tommy and Tommy poked one to Alijah where he got that dunk. Those are the two big winning plays, when we go back and break down the film, we’ll say, all right, these are the two instances that kind of allowed us to steal that victory.”
Florida will be heading to San Francisco next week for the Sweet 16, and will take on either Maryland or Colorado State. The trip out West is a homecoming for Golden, who coached at San Francisco before taking the job in Gainesville.
