Florida may have played its way into the NCAA Tournament on Tuesday night, but coach Billy Donovan didn’t want to talk about it.
Avoiding the numbers games involved in figuring out whether the Gators will make the field of 65, Donovan was more interested in the fact that UF’s 75-62 win over Tennessee put his team in third in the Southeastern Conference East.
“The more games we win, the better chance we have to go. If we lose the rest of our games, we won’t go,” Donovan said. “The game was much more about the fact that we’re in third place — the fact that we’re a game out of second. That’s what the game was about.”
UF (20-8, 9-4 SEC) has a shot at taking the second-place spot from Vanderbilt, which would put it in position for a first-round bye in the SEC Tournament. And the team hasn’t been mathematically eliminated from the first-place race yet, although Kentucky currently has a strong hold on the top spot.
The Gators will finish out the regular season against the Commodores and Wildcats, but their hopes of climbing up the rankings start Saturday at 4 p.m. against Georgia (12-14, 4-9 SEC) in Athens.
The Bulldogs have struggled throughout the year and are among the worst teams in the SEC, but they have practically been a different squad in Stegeman Coliseum.
All four of Georgia’s league wins have come at home, and two were double-digit beatings of ranked teams: a 78-63 win over then-No. 8 Tennessee on Jan. 23 and a 72-58 victory against then-No. 18 Vanderbilt on Feb. 6.
“They’re really tough at home. They’ve won conference games. They’ve played people tough,” junior forward Chandler Parsons said. “We’ve got a lot of respect for them as a team, and we’re not going to take them lightly.”
The Bulldogs also upset then-No. 17 Georgia Tech, took down South Carolina and edged Alabama in Athens.
“They’re a confident team at home,” Donovan said. “They’ve had some phenomenal home wins and have been an extremely good home team. I don’t feel at all our guys are going into this game and looking at Georgia or their record or anything like that at all.”
One thing UF would be well-served to look at, though, is the game tape from its 87-71 beatdown of Georgia in Gainesville on Jan. 27.
The Gators negated a hot shooting night by the Bulldogs by forcing 19 turnovers and taking 13 more shots.
Georgia shot 59.6 percent from the field and 57.1 percent from beyond the arc in the teams’ first matchup, but UF’s relentless full-court pressure led to 12 steals and a big win despite its lower-percentage shooting.
Parsons said he expects more of the same this time around.
“We’re going to press them, get up and down with them, force their guards to handle the ball,” Parsons said. “They have great personnel, so we’re going to have to match that and play good defense.”
As effective as it was against the Bulldogs earlier this season, Donovan was a little more reluctant to guarantee a similar game plan, as his team’s lack of depth makes pressing throughout the game more difficult.
“We’ve got to pick our spots and be smart. When we can press, I think we’ve got to do it,” Donovan said. “I always enjoy pressing and wish we had the depth to press all the time, but we don’t have that kind of depth so it’s an area we’re a little bit more selective in.”
