After Florida wrapped up a big week with a 70-68 win over Kentucky on Saturday, reality set in for Billy Donovan.
A reporter was asking if the Gators felt like they had some breathing room in the Southeastern Conference East with only seven games left in the regular season, when Donovan interrupted, “How many more games left?”
Seven.
“Jeez,” Donovan sighed.
With more than half the conference schedule in the books, all signs are pointing the Gators toward a better fate than the past three years of late-season collapses, disappointing losses and a complete inability to play with the elite teams in their own division.
UF is 7-2 in SEC play this season, a game and a half ahead of second-place Tennessee, a half-game behind Alabama for the best record in the conference and very much in control of its own postseason destiny.
Florida could sweep Vanderbilt and Kentucky this year — something it hasn’t done since 2005-06.
The Gators once again followed a quality victory with an even bigger win. They will be back in the AP Top 25 next week after spending the week at No. 23 in the USA Today/ESPN poll. (Which seemed a little too convenient, what with ESPN putting them in primetime twice last week.)
And analysts are already starting to pencil Florida’s name on their early NCAA Tournament brackets. ESPN “Bracketology” expert Joe Lunardi had UF as a No. 5 seed even before it beat No. 10 Kentucky.
ESPN.com’s Eamonn Brennan wrote after Saturday’s win, “Florida now appears to be an NCAA Tournament lock.”
With six wins over top-50 RPI teams, it’s hard to argue against Brennan’s claim.
The Gators snuck into the Big Dance last year with a far less impressive résumé, and they are on track to add a regular-season conference title to the list — something they have only done once since 2001.
After Donovan paused to realize how little time is left in the season, he replied that he had no reason to feel comfortable with his team’s standing, even with only seven games left.
For Donovan, last week wasn’t the Gators’ biggest test. It’s what they do now, with a slightly higher profile following some time in the national spotlight and a sense of entitlement after two important victories.
“Do we have the maturity level, as a team, to handle going forward from here?” Donovan said. “That has been our No. 1 problem, is these situations. We have not handled them well.”
Donovan called Saturday’s win a microcosm of the team’s season: inconsistent, but resilient.
But this coming week isn’t about resiliency, and that’s what concerns Donovan. Florida could easily lose some of its momentum by dropping a trap game Wednesday at South Carolina, the only SEC East team UF has not beaten.
“We can not do that right now. That’s the worst thing that we can do, and I talked to them about it in the locker room after the game was over,” Donovan said. “We have a great opportunity to make incredible growth and steps as a team.”
The Gators have turned fumbling away late-season trap games into an art form the past few years, so Donovan has plenty of reasons to be concerned.
And he knows it’s never too late for a season to fall apart. Even in seven games.
