Lost Mojo: Can Mike White And The Gators Find It Again?

Mike White remembers when mojo and his Florida basketball team got a legal separation.

“At Oklahoma,” White said without hesitation Wednesday night after the Gators (9-6, 0-3 SEC) dropped their third straight SEC game to a ranked opponent, a 64-58 loss to No. 12 LSU. “We lost at Oklahoma. You remember what happened after that. We just didn’t respond well to it. It was this group’s first time experiencing adversity together. It didn’t end very well. We didn’t handle the adversity.”

The Gators didn’t handle adversity that night and they’ve done a rather poor job of handling it in the games since. Wednesday night’s loss to LSU followed an all-too-familiar pattern. For the third straight game, the Gator were slapped in the face early and it took awhile for them to figure out they were capable of going toe-to-toe with the Tigers. In all three SEC losses, the Gators have fallen behind by more than 10 points, only to rally furiously to get the margin back to a workable number. But, once they’re back within striking distance, they don’t have finishing power enough to pull off a win.

The Gators know how to make opponents sweat but they haven’t figured out how to put them away.

Against LSU, the Gators fell behind by 14 in the first half, then got back to within six. At the outset of the second half, LSU jumped out to a 14-point lead before the Gators woke up and started chipping away. It was a grind, but with 6:08 to go in the game, the Gators had trimmed 13 points off the deficit and were down 54-53. That’s when they hit the wall.

From that point onward, every time the Gators had an opportunity to either tie the game or take the lead, they missed a shot from the field, threw up a brick from the foul line or broke down defensively. The hole they dug was just a few shovels full of dirt too deep. This is a pattern that has been repeated so many times that it’s clearly weighing on White, who is every bit as frustrated as Florida fans that the Gators can’t seem to find any measure of consistency.

Whatever happened to throw the Gators off stride that night in Norman when Oklahoma handed Florida its first loss has kept the Gators from regaining any sense of momentum. In all three of the SEC losses plus the out-of-conference losses to Oklahoma and Maryland, the Gators have shown they’re more than capable of going toe-to-toe for long stretches of a game, but when it’s time to take the lead and win the game, the shots won’t fall, either from the field or the foul line or there are critical turnovers or blown defensive assignments.

Through the first six games of the season that didn’t happen. Looking back, White says, “I don’t think we embraced some of our deficiencies, some of our bad body language, some of our episodes of pouting, after our wins.” Perhaps all the problems we’re seeing in the last nine games were there all along, just cleverly disguised as the Gators looked like the surprise team in the nation and certainly Florida’s best team since White took the Gators to the

Elite Eight in 2017. In that 6-0 start, the Gators staked out wins over Florida State, California and now 16th-ranked Ohio State by making enough shots, minimalizing the turnovers and playing defensive toughness that has been absent the last couple of years. Particularly against FSU and Ohio State, the Gators were tough guys who, when punched in the nose, punched back twice as hard.

That team seems a distant memory. Since that 6-0 beginning, the Gators are 3-6. Five of the losses are to good teams, three of them (Alabama, Auburn and LSU) ranked in the top 25. The loss to Texas Southern, which came to the O-Dome 0-7, is beyond explaining. When things were going their way, the Gators played with swagger. When adversity showed up in an ugly way in Norman, mojo filed for a divorce and the separation since then has been painful.

“This team hasn’t handled adversity very well,” White said. “We handled success early on very well.”

There is only one non-conference game remaining on the schedule, a January 29 meeting in the O-Dome with Oklahoma State in the annual SEC/Big Eight Challenge. There are 15 SEC games remaining and it is those games plus the SEC Tournament that will determine if the Gators can make the NCAA for the fifth straight year (2020 doesn’t count since the entire NCAA Tournament was postponed due to COVID-19).

So, getting the mojo back in a hurry is a requirement. But how?

The obvious remedy would be for someone other than Colin Castleton step it up. Castleton has shown a warrior mentality and the ability to play through adversity. Every time out, Castleton knows what’s coming. The ball comes into the post and he’s surrounded immediately. He gets bumped, shoved, slapped, hacked and pushed but he fights back. Through Florida’s first 15 games he’s averaging 15.8 points and 9.2 rebounds per game. He’s among the nation’s leaders in blocked shots with 36.

In the loss to LSU, Castleton had 19 points, nine rebounds, two assists, three blocked shots and a steal. He hit 7-10 shots from the field and 5-6 from the foul line. When the ball came into the post, he didn’t force the action but instead let the offense flow through him. Castleton might have had 10-12 assists if the Gators had simply hit open shots when he found open shooters out of the double- and triple-teams.

The LSU game plan was pretty simple from the beginning – make Castleton work for everything with double teams and triple teams, even if it meant leaving open shooters on the perimeter. LSU trusted the Florida perimeter shooters to miss. They didn’t trust that they could stop Castleton one-on-one.

When 7-0 Efton Reid and 6-8 power forward/center Tari Eason were in the game, every time the ball went into the post to Castleton someone doubled down from the perimeter or the baseline. When Reid and Eason fouled out trying to get too physical with Castleton, LSU decided two defenders were not enough to stop Castleton so for all but a couple of minutes in the second half, they went to surrounding him with three players every time the ball went into the post.

Against a good shooting team it would be dangerous strategy. Against the Gators, it worked. While Castleton was highly efficient on those rare moments when he found an opening, Florida’s shooters weren’t. They launched 30 threes. Only seven found the bottom of the net. While Castleton hit 5-6 from the foul line, the rest of the team went 6-16 and there were numerous critical misses in the final six minutes.

LSU’s defensive strategy would have backfired if only the Gators would have made even two or three more of their threes. White and the Florida staff anticipated the Tigers would do the cut the head off the snake strategy so the offense really ran through Castleton. The result was the offense probably worked as well as it has all season long except for one minor little detail.

The Gators didn’t make their open shots and there were open shots to be had nearly every trip down the floor.

“I’m not sure we’ve gotten better looks all year and what’s a little disheartening was this was against the No. 1 defensive team in the country,” White said. “We got good looks. In the second half we really settled into our decisions and our strength of moving the ball. We made unselfish plays … the extra [pass].”

Whether it’s wide open shots like the Gators got against LSU or contested shots like the ones they took against Alabama, Auburn and Oklahoma, the results are consistently the same. The Gators shoot quite well against the bad teams. They struggle to make shots against the good ones.

It seems to have nothing to do with the defense, but more to do with Florida’s shooters.

These are the team numbers from the three-point line in the three SEC losses: Alabama 8-23; Auburn 6-22; LSU 7-30. The Gators were 5-24 in the loss to Texas Southern, 4-24 in the loss to Oklahoma and 11-27 in the loss to Maryland. So, in Florida’s SEC losses the Gators are 21-75 or 28 percent. In the three non-conference losses they are 20-75 or 26.6 percent. In the six losses, the Gators are 41-150 or 27.33 percent. In the nine wins the Gators are 73-220, which is 33.1 percent. For the season, UF is 114-374, which is 30.5 percent.

The way basketball has evolved into a game dominated by perimeter shooting, it’s hard to be successful when you’re three-point shooters are that bad.

These are the individual numbers for Florida’s most regular perimeter shooters in the six losses: Myreon Jones 10-43, Tyree Appleby 8-32, Brandon McKissic 8-23, Phlandrous Fleming Jr. 5-19, Anthony Duruji 4-14, C.J. Felder 5-11. For the entire season, Jones is 27-91 (29.7 percent), Appleby 20-67 (29.9 percent), McKissic 17-61 (27.9 percent), Fleming 17-47 (36.2 percent), Duruji 12-30 (40 percent), Felder (41.7 percent).

Shooting isn’t the only issue for the Gators, but it is the most glaring problem. In each of the SEC games, for example, the Gators rallied furiously from double-digit deficits but they couldn’t hit big shots at the end when they needed them the most. Solving the shooting problem is no guarantee that the Gators can break out of their slump, but at least it would put them in better position to discover their missing mojo. For the most part, the Gators are playing good enough defense – opponents are averaging only 63.4 points per game and they’re being held to 30 percent from the three-point line – but someone has to step up to take the load off Castleton’s shoulders. Better yet, more than just one shooter needs to get his groove back. Balance the floor with a capable shooter on each side with Castleton in the middle and it will be very difficult to double down on the UF big man.

The question, of course, is can the Gators shake out of the shooting doldrums or is this just the way it’s going to be the rest of the season? Shooters do catch fire, sometimes late in the season but if the Gators are going to start hitting shots, they have to quit putting so much pressure on themselves. Can they relax? Can they put that last miss behind them?

“If it’s not weighing on us right now, something is wrong,” White said.

But how do they eliminate that 900-pound gorilla on their shoulders? How do they stop the bleeding? How do the Gator shooters channel their inner Lee Humphrey? Is it as simple as learning to cope with adversity because the Gators are going to go face-to-face with it in Columbia Saturday afternoon when they face a South Carolina team that compensates for its lack of offensive skills by playing defense with piranha-like intensity?

“We have to get some sort of mojo back,” White said. “We’re going to face some adversity in Columbia. We know it’s coming … It’s going to be a war. We’ve got to be ready for it.”

The Gators are quite fortunate that only Auburn and Texas A&M in the SEC remain unbeaten. Maybe there is no catching Auburn, which is ranked fourth nationally, so a comeback to respectability is entirely possible. At this point, a 10-8 record in conference play will likely avoid playing on Wednesday in the SEC Tournament and could earn a double-bye into the Friday quarterfinals. A 10-8 conference record would put the Gators most likely needing one win at the SEC Tournament in Nashville to clinch a spot in the NCAA Tournament.

So, there is still hope that the Gators could turn things around, but hope will only get the Gators so far. At some point, they have to start making some shots, particularly at crunch time. If they continue at their current pace, they not only will miss the NCAA Tournament but might not make any postseason event. White still likes this team, but he knows the Gators are on the clock. They better figure out this adversity thing and while they’re about it start putting the ball in the basket.