Life On The Bubble: It Has Been A Way Of Life For The Gators
“Put your right arm in, take your right arm out. Put your right arm in and you shake it all about. Do the Hokey Pokey and you turn yourself around, that’s what it’s all about.” – Ray Anthony
Life on the bubble in college basketball is like doing the Hokey Pokey. One day Joe Lunardi and Jerry Palm have you in. The next day, you’re out. Then you’re in again but they’ve got you going to Dayton for a play-in game all because you had a close call with a Quad 2 team. It can be nerve-wracking, not only for coaches and players, but fans who study the brackets religiously.
Mike White and the Florida Gators can relate. It is called living on the edge, which is where the Gators seem to have been parked ever since that 6-0 start got them ranked as high as 14 in the Associated Press poll, 12th in the Coaches top 25. Since that auspicious beginning, the Gators are 13-11 and have been engaged in a constant flirtation with the NCAA bubble. The inability of Florida to string 5-6 consecutive wins together combined with a 3-game losing streak to start SEC play and three 2-loss streaks has made it impossible for the Gators to lock down a ticket to the Big Dance.
In some respects that the Gators are even in the NCAA Tournament conversation is remarkable when you consider the amount of adversity they’ve had to deal with. Here is Readers Digest Condensed version of the injuries and illness the Gators have had to deal with:
Phlandrous Fleming Jr.: He had a bout with COVID that slowed him down after Christmas. The Gators had their first SEC game at Ole Miss postponed because of too many players testing positive. That game was made up later but it made UF play four games in eight days, going 2-2.
Myreon Jones: Played at least 10 games with a broken finger that seriously affected his shot.
Colin Castleton: Missed six games after injuring his shoulder. The shoulder remains injured. Castleton plays in the game but doesn’t practice.
C.J. Felder: Had non-COVID illness that caused him to miss only one game, but it slowed him down and he’s just now starting to play at a high level again.
Jason Jitoboh: Just as he was starting to play at a high level, he suffered an eye injury against Tennessee on January 26. He has missed 10 games since season-ending surgery. Without Jitoboh to back up Castleton, the Gators are seriously challenged vertically.
Tyree Appleby: He has been playing through a deep thigh bruise suffered on February 15 against Texas A&M.
Anthony Duruji: He’s a vital member of Florida’s front court and one of only four players 6-7 or better on the roster. He’s missed the last two games while dealing with a lower leg injury.
Will injuries, COVID and sickness be taken into account when the Selection Committee announces the tournament field one week from Sunday? Or will they pay more attention to the slightly better than break-even record since getting off to a hot start?
Fortunately, for the Gators, this isn’t like football where two losses knock you out of the College Football Playoff picture and four or five doom you to the Opt Out Bowl where your best players take agent money and buy a car rather than practice 15 times for a game that if you lose you might be required to stay an extra week. A lot of nice people live in Shreveport and Birmingham, but they aren’t exactly travel destinations on everyone’s bucket list, particularly college football players with their eyes on the NFL prize.
College basketball is different because it has a reward system that doesn’t exist in football. For example, there are 14 teams in the Big Ten. There is a standing joke that when the NCAA announces its basketball tournament field, 19 of them will be among the field of 68. It does seem that any Big Ten team that finishes one game over .500 gets into the tournament. The ACC used to be that way, too, but it might be lucky to get four teams in this year.
They call this a 64-team field, but there are those four play-in games in Dayton every year. So, technically speaking it’s a 68-team field but you don’t have to be a math major to figure out that four make the “official” 64 and four go home when they lose in Dayton. The play-in game isn’t a death sentence either. Just a year ago UCLA began its run to the Final Four by beating Michigan State in an 11th-seed play-in game. In 2011, VCU started its run to the Final Four in Dayton with a win over Southern Cal.
You can be eliminated from College Football Playoff consideration before September has come and gone. Basketball is a bit more forgiving. In basketball, you can spend an entire season on the bubble just like the Gators and still make the NCAA Field because you scored some important wins late in the regular season or at the conference tournament. You can make it to the Final Four and even win the whole damn thing with 10 or more losses. Rollie Massimino and Villanova won the tournament in 1985 with a 10-loss team that upset Patrick Ewing and Georgetown in the championship game. Danny and the Miracles won it for Kansas (Larry Brown coached, Bill Self and John Calipari assistants) in 1988 with a team that lost 11 games. Since 2011, five teams have made the Final Four with 10 or more losses – 2011 VCU (11), 2014 Kentucky (10), 2015 Michigan State (11), 2016 Syracuse (13) and 2017 South Carolina (10).
There are also conference tournaments that can put teams on and knock them off the bubble as well as give a highly improbable team its chance to play Cinderella. It wasn’t all that long ago (2008) that Georgia came to the Southeastern Conference Tournament 13-16 and Dennis Felton’s coaching seat blowtorch hot. A funny thing happened on the way to Felton’s pink slip, however. Georgia beat Ole Miss in overtime in round one and then there was a tornado that damaged the Georgia Dome so badly the quarterfinals, semifinals and championship game were played at cozy Alexander Coliseum on the Georgia Tech campus. Before a crowd of maybe 200 family and media, Georgia had to play twice on the same day, beating Kentucky in the quarterfinals and Mississippi State in the semifinals on Saturday before beating Arkansas in the championship game on Sunday. Georgia made the NCAA Tournament with a 17-16 record, delaying by a full year the termination of Felton’s gainful employment in Athens.
The Gators aren’t a bad basketball team like that 2008 team from Georgia, but they simply haven’t been able to string enough wins together to be convincing. They’re sitting 19-11 overall (9-8 in the SEC) with Kentucky coming to Gainesville Saturday for the regular season finale at the O-Dome. The joint will be rocking, maybe even more than it was a couple of weeks ago when the Gators scored the biggest upset in O-Dome history by knocking off then No. 2 Auburn. Should the Gators shock the 7th-ranked Wildcats, who Joe Lunardi and Jerry Palm have sitting on two lines in their brackets, they can all but forget the bubble. With 20 regular season wins overall and 10 SEC wins that include wins over top ten teams that are quite capable of winning a national championship, the Gators will be mortal locks to get in, maybe even with a 7-10 seed. That is not a bad place to be since there really isn’t all that much difference between a seven and a ten. As the seeding numbers grow closer together, the more parity there is. There is a reason why only once in NCAA history has a No. 16 beaten a No. 1. Games between teams seeded 7-10 turn out to be rock fights with none of them having that great an advantage.
Should the Gators lose to Kentucky, it’s back to the familiar bubble watch. That would mean at least one win and possibly two in Tampa at the SEC Tournament next week will be a requirement for Florida to get its dance card punched on Selection Sunday. Currently the Gators are in a three-way tie for fifth in the SEC with No. 25 Alabama and South Carolina. The Gators will play their first SEC Tournament game on Thursday. It would be desirable for the Gators to finish either fifth or sixth in the final standings because their first game would be against either Vanderbilt, Missouri, Ole Miss or Georgia. A combined 6-1 record against those four makes it favorable that UF could advance to the quarterfinals on Friday.
There are no guarantees that just winning that first round game would be enough to get the Gators into the NCAA Tournament, but there are certain built-in advantages that favor the Gators. For one thing, the SEC is as strong a league as there is in the country. If you need evidence, then look to the SEC/Big 12 Challenge, won by the SEC. Among the SEC’s six wins were Kentucky blowing the doors off Kansas and Alabama bushwhacking Baylor. Lunardi has both Baylor and Kansas as No. 1 seeds. Jerry Palm has Auburn as a top seed with Kentucky a two and both Tennessee and Baylor as fours.
History is also on the side of the Gators. Only six teams in the entire country have made the NCAA Tournament every year the tournament was played since 2017. Bluebloods like Kentucky, Duke and Michigan State haven’t done it, but Florida has and the one year the tournament wasn’t played –2020 – the Gators were 19-12 and a likely six or seven seed due to their 11-7 record in conference play. Teams with a history of making the tournament field do seem to get preferential treatment by the Selection Committee.
As of Thursday afternoon, here is where three prominent bracketologists see the Gators:
Joe Lunardi of ESPN has the Gators on his Next Four Out, which is to say they are one of eight teams he believes wouldn’t get in the tournament if the selections were made today.
Jerry Palm of CBS has the Gators starting the tournament in Dayton in a 12-seed play-in game against VCU (21-7) with the winner playing 5th-seeded Texas (21-9) in the West Region first round.
Michael Lazarus of Yahoo Sports also has the Gators in Dayton only in a Midwest Regional play-in game against Xavier (17-12) of the Big East. The winner would face Southern Cal (25-5).
Sometimes the people who do the brackets are amazingly accurate, but this isn’t your typical year as we discovered last weekend when seven of the Associated Press top ten teams lost. Unlike so many years when so many dominant teams eliminated much of the guesswork, this year there is far more parity than ever before. The transfer portal has something to do with that. Many of the teams that have improved via the transfer portal have done it with kids who are transferring from teams from one-big conferences to teams in leagues that typically land multiple bids. The Southeastern Conference, for example, which figures to get as many as seven teams in the NCAA Tournament, has 56 kids who came in via the transfer portal this year, 23 from typical one-bid leagues.
Where would Florida be without transfers? The four transfers who came in via the transfer portal this year are all major contributors. Phlandrous Fleming Jr. (from Charleston Southern of the Big South) and Brandon McKissic (from Kansas City of the Horizon League), were big stars in one-bid leagues. They came to Florida for the chance to live out the dream of playing in the NCAA Tournament. C.J. Felder was at Boston College, which fired its coach because the program was going nowhere. Ditto for Myreon Jones who came from Penn State. Both of them can do something they never would have done at their previous schools.
Will their dreams come true? They can ensure that it will happen Saturday if they succeed in knocking off Kentucky at the O-Dome. If not, they’ll spend another few days on the NCAA bubble, knowing they either have to win one or two games at the SEC Tournament or its off the bubble and squarely into the NIT.
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