Florida Gators: Focused on a repeat
It's a great time to be a Gator.
The University of Florida's men's basketball team won the national championship last April and the football team followed that with a national championship in January, making the school the first to hold both crowns at the same time. You can buy T-shirts in UF's student store touting the "Gator Slam."
The football team followed its title with what is considered by many to be the No. 1 recruiting class in the nation, and the basketball team has reached the Sweet 16 of this year's NCAA Tournament, giving the Gators a strong chance of being the first school to repeat as NCAA champions since Duke in 1992.
Oh, and the high temperature in Gainesville, Fla., on Tuesday was 77 degrees, and the humidity in north central Florida was low. Good times indeed.
It's been surreal, the fact we're national champions in those two areas,'' said Josh Jackson, a junior at Florida majoring in political science.
The trick of repeating as NCAA basketball champion has never been tougher. Since UCLA won the last of seven straight titles in 1973, Duke's back-to-back champs are the only teams to turn the trick.
But the Gators (31-5) are four wins away, and they will be a decided favorite against Butler — just about the only upstart left — in the regional semifinal Friday at the Edward Jones Dome. The winner will face Oregon or UNLV in the regional final Sunday, and many see Florida as having the easiest route to the Final Four.
Not only has the Gators' trip toward a second national title defied the odds, the way they have done it has been unconventional. When a team wins a title, it's supposed to be followed by the departure of the team's best players, either because of graduation or because players are ready for the NBA. Yet three of the Gators' best players, forwards Joakim Noah and Corey Brewer and center Al Horford, decided to return for a try at another title.
That decision made Florida the obvious NCAA title favorite at the start of the season. The only reason to pick against the Gators was the law of averages.
At Florida, they chose not to look at it as defending a championship but as winning a different one. "We won that one (last year)," sixth man Chris Richard said during the SEC tournament. "Nobody can take that one away. We just want to win another one."
"We've talked about it a little bit,'' guard Lee Humphrey told reporters last week. "We're aware that we've won a lot of games here at Florida and done a lot of stuff that never happened in school history, and we've got a chance to do something that's never been done in a while. We'd love to do that."
Florida coach Billy Donovan realized he couldn't have his team do the same thing as last season and expect to win, so he changed things up and, among other things, brought in a collection of guest speakers, including New England Patriots coach Bill Belichick, who talked about what it takes to repeat as a champion.
"I think when you win a national championship, there's a level of reality that's missing," Donovan told reporters. "There's a false sense of what reality is. You can very easily fall into that path, and it takes you out of what it's really all about. I think our guys for the most part have remained really grounded."
The biggest difference is that last season, few were expecting Florida to win the national title. The Gators went into the NCAA Tournament as a No. 3 seed, respectable and certainly in the ballpark of teams that had a shot, but by no means a frontrunner. This season, as the No. 1 from day one, it's been an entirely different experience.
"This, right now, has nothing to do with last year,'' Donovan said at the start of the tournament. "It has nothing to do with experience. If it had to do with experience, we wouldn't have won last year because we had no experience last year."
Florida ran off 17 consecutive wins in the middle of the season, and it wasn't until after clinching the SEC title that the Gators slipped again, dropping three of four games, before running off three lopsided wins in the SEC tournament. In the first two rounds of the NCAA Tournament, the Gators were never dominant, especially in the first halves against Jackson State and Purdue, but they came on strong in the second half.
"We may not always play great, but I know they care about playing to the best of their abilities," Donovan said, "and if we don't reach that potential, I know it's never because of a lack of will or try. The greatest compliment I can say is that they care."
And they have certainly made the rest of the nation notice.
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