White's big mistake was trying to follow a legend

Perhaps at another time and under different circumstances, Mike White would have taken the Gators to new basketball heights. Maybe, but he came to Florida, eyes wide open as the successor to Billy Donovan. Maybe Mike never got the memo that’s been passed around for generations in just about every sport there is: NEVER, under any circumstance, follow a legend.

Lou Holtz once said he didn’t want to be the coach who followed Woody Hayes at Ohio State, but he wouldn’t mind being the guy who followed the guy who followed Woody. The guy who followed Woody was Earle Bruce, who got to two Rose Bowls in nine years and had a dandy 81-26-1 record. But he didn’t win national championships. He wasn’t Woody Hayes.

He was “Old 9-3 Earle Bruce,” alluding to the string of six straight 9-3 seasons he posted.

Six coaches, including one who never coached a game after a close encounter with a stripper named Destiny in Pensacola torpedoed his career before it even started, tried to chase the ghost of Bear Bryant. It only took 35 years for Alabama to find a worthy successor in Nick Saban. Now that he’s won six national championships and probably will win a couple more before he retires, pity the fool who tries to follow Nick.

At Kentucky, Tubby Smith won a national championship in 1998 but discovered that until you’ve won four national championships like Adolph Rupp you’re just another coach. The pressure of chasing the ghost of Rupp grew so intense he resigned after 10 years and left for Minnesota, which had neither tradition nor prestige.

Mike White wasn’t a bad basketball coach at Florida, but he wasn’t Billy. Billy had charisma both on and off the court. Billy’s teams were exciting. Billy’s teams won six SEC championships, four SEC tournaments, two national championships and made it to the Final Four two other times.

Mike White’s teams weren’t all that exciting, never won the SEC regular season nor the tournament and the closest he came to a Final Four was 2017 when a disastrous final two minutes against South Carolina in the Elite Eight game ended the season. And what a season it might have been except that 6-11, 260-pound center John Egbunu went down with an ACL tear midway through February. With Egbunu, the Gators had a force in the middle. Without him, they lived and died by the 3-ball. In the end, they died.

A lot of coaches believe that Florida could have won the national championship in 2017 with a healthy Egbunu. If the Gators had won it, would that have significantly changed the trajectory of Mike White’s career at UF? Would he have struggled to recruit big men in the next 2-3 years if Egbunu had gotten the Gators to the Final Four and perhaps to the promised land?

Those are things we’ll never know. Injuries have had a significant effect on winning and losing the last seven years. Besides Egbunu there were Gorjok Gak (knees cost him three seasons, transferred to California Baptist), Keith Stone (ACL, transferred to Miami), Chase Johnson (concussions, transferred to Dayton) and Keyontae Johnson (collapsed on the court at Tallahassee December 12, 2020, hasn’t played since) and always, it seemed there was someone with some nagging injury that either slowed him down or kept him out. This season alone Colin Castleton hasn’t been able to practice due to a bum shoulder that cost him six games. Jason Jitoboh suffered a season-ending eye injury while Castleon was out. Tyree Appleby has been playing through a thigh contusion. Anthony Duruji has been trying to go for weeks on a bum ankle. CJ Felder’s hip has limited him for the last eight weeks.

Injuries are part of the game and dealing with them often separates bad from good and good from great coaches. White has been a good coach. Who knows if he could have or would have been great without so many injuries.

Recruiting was also a major issue. In seven years, White only had two memorable recruiting classes – 2018 when he landed Johnson, Andrew Nembhard, Noah Locke and Omar Payne; and 2020 when he landed McDonald’s All-Americans Scottie Lewis and Tre Mann. When White departed for Georgia, Johnson was the only Gator remaining out of that bunch and he hasn’t played since he collapsed at FSU. Nembhard (Gonzaga), Locke (Louisville) and Payne (Illinois) transferred out. Mann (first round) and Lewis (second) were drafted by the NBA after two seasons.

White didn’t do a very good job replacing those guys and it showed this season when he had to rely too heavily on transfers. White always had transfers on his team, but it’s one thing to have a Canyon Barry or an Egor Koulechov or Kerry Blackshear Jr. for one year and it’s altogether different when your first seven players all began their collegiate careers somewhere else as was the case in 2021-22 and only two of them started out at power conference schools.

Recruiting is one reason Billy Donovan left for the NBA. Billy finally got tired of losing recruits to teams he knew or had reason to suspect were bending way too many rules. He also got tired of those same recruits coming back to beat him. So, he threw up his hands and left for the NBA where he doesn’t have to deal with 17-year-old kids whose AAU handlers tell him he’s the greatest thing since the invention of paper cups, crushed ice and plastic straws.

White spent seven years at Florida playing it squeaky clean on the recruiting trail. He didn’t land many stud recruits, but there wasn’t a hint of a recruiting violation either. That can’t be said about many others in the Southeastern Conference. The phrase “Sure, Everybody Cheats” was coined about the SEC back in the 1970s. A lot of folks say the same thing applies to basketball these days and times.

Well, Mike White didn’t cheat although we can’t say for certain that applies to the other 13 SEC coaches. Auburn, for instance, made a Final Four (2019) with a coach (Bruce Pearl), who was implicated in the college basketball corruption trials and who got fired and show cause at his previous gig (Tennessee). Bruce Pearl still has a job, still lands top recruits like SEC Freshman of the Year Jabari Smith, who is probably going to be the first player taken in the NBA Draft, and might very well win the NCAA championship this year. Will Wade won an SEC and 105 games in five years before the long arm of the NCAA law caught up with him with a Notice of Allegations served on the eve of the NCAA Tournament. He’s been fired but it took three years for it to happen and that was after the FBI produced a wiretap recording of Wade bragging about buying Javonte Smart. Alabama and South Carolina were implicated in the corruption scandal, but both managed to wiggle out of serious trouble and instead got slaps on the wrist. John Calipari has never been lit up by the NCAA while at Kentucky but he had Final Four appearances vacated by the NCAA while at UMass and Memphis, his previous two jobs.

It's admirable that Mike White never cheated and ran a clean program. It’s one of the reasons that he wasn’t about to be fired. Not this year anyway. He’s leaving Florida on his own free will. Perhaps Georgia will be a better fit because for whatever reasons you can think of – lack or relationships with the AAU coaches, injuries, inconsistent recruiting, relying too heavily on transfers, never hiring an assistant coach who was a real offensive guru – White just wasn’t the right fit here. There was always something that kept the stars and planets from aligning so the choice to find a new place to coach might be the result of serious looks in the mirror and soul searching that told him there is no time like the present to leave.

The choice of Georgia seems a bit questionable although one thing for certain, there are no legends to follow in Athens when it comes to the round ball. Tom Crean was 6-26 last season, the worst year in Georgia history, and 47-75 in four years. Before Crean, Georgia fired Mark Fox, who was 163-133 in nine seasons. Some think the reason Crean, Fox and nearly every other coach who’s been at Georgia has failed is because there is no serious commitment to the sport as evidenced by Stegman Coliseum, which has earned its reputation as the worst arena in the SEC. The renovated O-Dome is adequate, but an absolute palace compared to Stegman.

Maybe Georgia is promising White to spend some of that big SEC money into a new building, the kind that will be attractive to all those studs an hour away in Metro Atlanta. Maybe there are promises that basketball will become a priority sport, not just something to pass the time before spring football. Perhaps Georgia has gotten jealous watching football schools like Alabama and Auburn commit unprecedented (for them) resources to basketball and get the results. Perhaps Georgia thinks that a coach with a squeaky clean image and squeaky clean, brand new facilities can do what Nate Oates is doing at Alabama or Bruce Pearl is doing at Auburn.

Whatever promises have been made, they are enough that Mike White is no longer at Florida and is the head basketball coach at Georgia.

At Florida, much of the fan base adamantly called for a new coach while an equal number were apathetic. Georgia fans may very well welcome White with open arms and think he can’t be any worse than the guy they just fired. Then again, they may look at White as a bunt single hire when a home run was demanded by the fan base. Only time will tell if White can win consistently enough to win over the Georgia fan base.

About the only thing that is an absolute at this point is that both the University of Florida and Mike White have wiped their slates clean and both have a fresh start. Florida is now one coach removed from Billy Donovan and that should help lure the kind of coach who will successfully woo the Florida fan base and regenerate the excitement that has been lost from the program. Florida is very capable of regaining its status as one of the better programs in the country. It just takes the right guy with the right approach. At Georgia, Mike White starts new without the pressure of trying to be the next Billy Donovan. Instead he can focus on being the first Mike White and maybe that’s all he needs to win more ball games than he won at Florida.