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What Happened To The Florida Gators?

By Daniel Tran

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The Florida Gators started the season ranked the seventh best team in the nation. Currently, they are unranked, not even garnering a vote in the latest AP Poll. What went wrong?

When thinking about the NCAA National Champions of recent years, it does not seem too long ago that Florida Gators head coach Billy Donovan was hoisting the championship trophy with the help of Al Horford, Corey Brewer, and Joakim Noah. Then, it hits you like a ton of holy-crap-I-am-old bricks that it happened nine years ago.

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Florida had a couple of slim seasons after that championship year due to losing all five starters from that team and missed the NCAA Tournament two consecutive years. Billy Donovan was able to recover and improve the team year after year until they reached the Final Four last season using the strength of four senior starters to get them there.

Losing that amount of talent coming into this season would have been difficult to recover from, but with the 13th best recruiting class in the nation according to ESPN coming in and the return of Michael Frazier II and Dorian Finney-Smith, Florida should have had an easier time at least sustaining their success with more talent than they had when they had to reload after 2007.

However, they could not live up to their No. 7 ranking in the preseason AP Poll. The Gators have been struggling with inconsistency, suspensions, and disqualifications that have eventually led to their omission from the AP Poll Top 25 altogether.

Before the season even started, the Gators lost four-star recruit Brandone Francis due to academic reasons and suspended forward Chris Walker three games. Once the season began and the Gators got Chris Walker back, inconsistent play has doomed Florida.

Their failure to produce early has caused Billy Donovan to switch his starting lineups multiple times, attempting to find the right combination of players that can perform consistently. Florida got caught in a rough non-conference schedule that resulted in lost games against Georgetown, Miami, North Carolina, and Kansas while they were still trying to find their identity on the court.

The Gators started conference play well, winning their first three games. However, they followed that up with a three-game losing streak where they lost to Georgia, LSU, and Mississippi: teams that have inferior talent.

The problem is the two players that Florida was depending upon to carry the load for them have struggled to put up regular numbers. In the loss against Georgia, Michael Fraizer II had 10 points and four rebounds in 23 minutes. Against LSU the next game, Fraizer II only managed eight points in 33 minutes of play.

To compound the problem, Dorian Finney-Smith as been guilty of inconsistency as much as Fraizer. In the loss against Mississippi, Finney-Smith scored 15 points, had six rebounds and two assists. The next game against Alabama, he had two points.

With the other players, you can expect this kind of uneven play, but from the stars of the team, there can be no success as a unit until they get their games straightened out. Both players are at a loss for words when trying to articulate what has gone wrong with the season.

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    • “If I knew, I probably would help do something about it,” Frazier stated.

    “We are not doing our job as a team,” Finney-Smith said. “As soon as we correct that, there might be some change.”

    Coming off a loss against Vanderbilt, Florida faces its toughest test of the season against the Kentucky Wildcats on Saturday, but it comes at an inopportune time for the Gators. Florida is still trying to figure out their lineups and they are far from playing their best basketball of the season.

    Of course, in the middle of the season, crazier things have happened and Florida could play up to the competition and actually give the Wildcats a good fight. However, with the troubles Florida has faced so far, do not be surprised if the Gators continue their trend of SEC mediocrity.

    Next: Sun Belt: Southern-Not-State Rivalry Spills Over into Basketball

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