Gators Two Wins Shy of Becoming College Basketball Royalty
Florida basketball
With two more wins this weekend in Dallas, the Florida Gators can become among the super elite of this sport. How amazing would this be? Hollywood couldn’t have come up with a script this crazy.
Consider the fact that the Gators first NCAA Tournament game was 1897. Think about that for a minute. Michael Jordan’s North Carolina Tar Heels memorable win over the Georgetown Hoyas had already happened. Jim Valvano and the North Carolina State Wolfpack’s memorable run to the 1983 national championship had already happened. The famous Villanova Wildcats win over the Hoyas in 1985 had already happened. Not only had the Gators never won a championship then, they had never played one NCAA Tournament game.
In 1987, when the Gators played their first NCAA Tournament game against North Carolina State, the players who would bring them their back to back national championships were babies. Al Horford, Corey Brewer, Joakim Noah and Taurean Green were all born between 1985 and 1986. Also, in 1987, a young hot shot at Providence College took advantage of the first year of the three point shot in college basketball to help get the Friars to the Final Four. His name was Billy Donovan. Florida made it to the Sweet Sixteen that tournament with wins over NC State and the Purdue Boilermakers before losing in the Sweet Sixteen to the Syracuse Orange. The Orange would go down in the championship game to the Indiana Hoosiers on a buzzer beater from Keith Smart.
Fast forward to 1994. Casey Prather, Patric Young, Scottie Wilbekin and Wil Yeguete were all babies. Florida made their fourth NCAA Tournament appearance in school history that year. Their football team had reached a new pinnacle of success the season before by winning their first SEC Championship Game over the Alabama Crimson Tide and then followed that with a Sugar Bowl rout over the unbeaten West Virginia Mountaineers. A school that had been so hungry for football success for decades was riding high. Basketball was merely an afterthought. In fact, more than that, basketball was always an afterthought to football. Now it was not even on the radar.
But a funny thing happened that NCAA Tournament. The Gators won in the first round over the James Madison Dukes 64-62. They followed that one up with a win over the Penn Quakers in the Round of 32. Hmm. In the Sweet Sixteen they pulled off a huge upset with an overtime win over the #2 UConn Huskies. Then they beat the Boston College Eagles in their first Elite Eight game to advance to the first Final Four in school history. Suddenly basketball was more than just something to pass the time until spring football started. The momentum was not enough to suit head coach Lon Kruger though as he left the Gators after a first round exit in 1995 to become the head coach of the Illinois Illini.
Athletic Director Jeremy Foley was blown away when he interviewed the young head coach of the Marshall Thundering Herd. Billy Donovan played for Rick Pitino on the Providence Friars 1987 Final Four team and then became an assist coach under Pitino at the University of Kentucky. Donovan was offered the Florida job, but his mentor, Pitino told him not to take it. His reasoning was that nobody at the school cared about basketball. Football was and would always be the only sport that mattered. But Donovan took the job anyway.
In 1999, in his third season, Donovan led his young Gators, with prize recruits Mike Miller and Udonis Haslem to the Sweet Sixteen where they lost a heart-breaker to a school nobody had ever heard of before, the Gonzaga Bulldogs. Then in 200.they made an incredible run all the way to the national championship game. In the first round they beat the Butler Bulldogs on a buzzer beater in overtime from Miller. Their second round victim was none other than Kruger’s Illiois team. They also knocked off the #1 Duke Blue Devils in the Sweet Sixteen, the Oklahoma State Cowboys in the Elite Eight and the Tar Heels in the Final Four before falling to the Michigan State Spartans in the championship game. Basketball had now taken hold in Gainesville.
How do we know this? Because in the next five years, despite being very competitive during the regular season and going to the championship game of the 2005 and 2005 SEC Tournaments, even winning the SEC Tournament in 2005, Gator fans were disgruntled over the fact that the team did not get to a Sweet Sixteen in any of those years. Little did the fans know, the freshman class of 2004 was coming in right then. And they would change Florida Gators basketball seasons forever. After starting their sophomore campaign 17-0, these guys were fast becoming rock stars on campus.
By the time they were done, they would win three straight SEC Tournaments, two straight NCAA Tournaments, 13 NCAA Tournament games and would become the greatest class in gator basketball history, and one of the best in college basketball history. They would knock the UCLA Bruins out of back to back Final Fours. The Bruins came into the 2006 national championship game against the Gators having won 23 out of their last 24 Final Four games. They had 11 NCAA Tournament titles to UF’s 0. The Gators did not care. they beat them by 16 points in 2006 and 10 points in 2007.
After beating the Ohio State Buckeyes in the 2007 NCAA Tournament Championship Game, a mere three months after the Gators football team had done the same to them in the BCS National Championship game, the Gators foursome known as the ’04s, all left for the NBA.
Donovan was then left with the choice to take the job of the Orlando Magic, the Kentucky Wildcats or stay at Florida. The least likely of the three was staying at UF. He took the Magic job, but then a few days later, he changed his mind ans asked for his job back. This was the biggest break he and Florida basketball ever got. It took three years for him to get Florida back to the NCAA Tournament. But in 2010, he landed another class that was not highly regarded, but has turned out to be one of the best in Gators history.
All the Class of 2010 has done is go to four consecutive Elite Eights, won three regular season SEC championships, an SEC Tournament championship, gone 18-0 in the SEC (the first team to ever do this) won 14 NCAA Tournament games (and counting) and is two wins away from putting Florida into a class of only nine schools with three NCAA Tournament championships. This list includes UCLA, Kentucky, Indiana, North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, Louisville and UConn. There is not a football school among them. That’s pretty good for a team that had never seen a NCAA Tournament game until 1987.
