This year’s Florida basketball team has fallen from near the top of college basketball’s Mount Everest to the depths of the Mariana Trench by the standards Billy Donovan has set for the program as its head coach.
Doomsday scenarios have Florida playing in the College Basketball Invitational, while most analysts see the Gators going to the National Invitation Tournament.
However, with a miracle by way of a Southeastern Conference tournament hot streak, a berth in the NCAA tournament is still a possibility.
But what disgruntled fans don’t see is what Donovan does — that a March spent playing in college basketball’s less than marquee postseason events can teach a team valuable lessons if its members are willing to listen.
"Those teams that went to the NIT in back-to-back years (2008, 2009), I didn’t think that we learned anything from the first NIT to the second NIT," Donovan said.
"Did not learn a thing. It took two of those to actually start to see some change, and I’m hopeful that these guys can see some stuff and as a coaching staff, we can help them internalize and visualize and see and visualize what it is to help them grow."
That team had a similar circumstance to this one: a championship caliber team that had key cogs leave it.
Enter in a team with talent to follow, but a largely unproven group whose flaws were masked by better teammates before they took prominent roles on the team.
It’s assumed that Donovan could plug and play and everything would be status quo, but growing pains strike and the team struggles thanks in large part to an inability to get the message from the coaches’ mouths to the players’ heads and then get it to translate out onto the floor when the lights turn on.
Donovan, the CEO of one of college basketball’s millennial powerhouses takes that personally.
"Right now, I feel in a lot of ways I have been unable to help them in a lot of those areas," Donovan said.
"For me, as a coach, I get disappointed in myself because I couldn’t be of more help. It’s not necessarily from a lack of trying, it’s not like we have bad kids that don’t listen, but for whatever reason, we have not — and I have not — been able to get them to do those things on a consistent basis. At times for me, I feel like I’ve let them down in some ways and that bothers me."
Wednesday night, the Vanderbilt Commodores (14-11, 4-8 SEC) come to the O’Connell Center. The Commodores have won three of their last four games — including a 67-61 victory over the Gators (12-13, 5-7 SEC) to start that stretch — after dropping seven straight Southeastern Conference after starting the league slate with a 1-7 record.
That game, Vanderbilt shot 42 free throws to Florida’s 16 and dominated on the glass, outrebounding UF 42-26.
UF’s problems with defending without fouling and lack of dominant post presence shone through that night in Memorial Gym, and Florida hopes this game can turn its own woeful performance this season around and gather some momentum for wherever they go this postseason.
"I think sometimes people look at the result of winning and losing and determine whether or not a team is playing at a high level or not," Donovan said. "I think that they have always been playing really well. I think if you look at some of their scores, when they started out the league maybe 1-7 or whatever it was, I mean they were really, really competitive. Now there were a couple of games where they got beat handily. But they were right there, they were in some games and had some chances to win a lot of those games."
Follow Richard Johnson on Twitter @RagjUF
Billy Donovan looks down the court during Florida's 75-55 win against Auburn on Jan. 15 in the O'Connell Center.
