March Madness No. 1 seed Florida brushes off SEC tourney loss and eyes a national title repeat

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GAINESVILLE, Fla. (AP) — Nothing will convince Florida coach Todd Golden that losing in the Southeastern Conference Tournament was a positive.

Not even six consecutive wins and another national title.

“I get it, but I’m not with it,” Golden said Monday. “We’re going to definitely learn from it. We’re going to use it to our advantage, for sure, but I’m never going to be like, ‘Oh, man, I’m glad we lost.’”

The Gators (26-7) landed a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament despite getting thumped by Vanderbilt in the semifinals of the league tourney. Florida got punched in the mouth early and never responded, a disappointing — some might call it eye-opening — showing before the Big Dance.

Golden is hoping the 17-point setback serves as a wake-up call for a team that had won 12 in a row up to that point. The defending national champion Gators open their repeat bid Friday night in nearby Tampa against the winner of a play-in game between Lehigh and Prairie View A&M.

“When you do lose, you can really drill down on some areas that you need to improve on,” Golden said. “When you’re winning, I think that’s more difficult. It’s more difficult to teach. It’s more difficult to hold accountable. But now we don’t have that issue off a loss and hopefully we respond the same way that we did after we lost to Auburn on January 24th.”

The Gators looked downright unstoppable during their streak that included an average margin of victory of 20.5 points. But they seemed off against the Commodores, missing 10 layups, turning the ball over 14 times and allowing wide-open looks from 3-point range.

Was it a blip? A bad matchup? Or maybe something more foreboding?

Golden insists it was a one-off performance, not a sign of something being wrong or a blueprint for how to beat the best rebounding team in the country.

“The great thing for us is we have already been an iteration of ourselves that we need to be to make a deep run,” he said. “That’s what we’ve been over the last two months. So we need to get back on track to what we were.

“We have been playing like the No. 2 team in America since January (6th). We know what we’re capable of. We know what that looks like. We just have to go back out and do it.”

The Gators have responded all season, whether it was stringing together wins after losses or answering questions about perceived flaws: Can they close out tight games? Yes. Are they good enough from 3-point range? For sure. Do they have consistent contributors off the bench? No doubt.

Florida started the season 5-4 and was unranked by January. But the Gators have since figured out how to mesh dual point guards Boogie Fland and Xaivian Lee, how to get more shots for sixth man Urban Klavzar and how to best utilize the most dominant frontcourt in school history, a lineup that features Rueben Chinyelu, Alex Condon and Thomas Haugh.

The group was good enough to go toe-to-toe with Arizona, Duke and UConn early and good enough to reel off 12 straight in SEC play late. Now is it good enough to repeat?

“We want to bring the fight to everybody,” Golden said. “We do that more often than not. We talk a lot to our team about being the mentally and physically tougher team. … Vandy got us because they ran to the fight quicker than we did.

“We can’t allow anybody else to dictate how we play. It’s really important that we take pride in that and take the accountability that it’s on us and not on anybody else.”

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