It’s very 2015 of me to write, but a Snapchat, of all things defines pretty accurately what happened Saturday in the O’Connell Center during Florida’s 57-56 win over Arkansas.
Twitter user @RyanKaufman5, a 22-year-old Criminology senior at UF, tweeted a screenshot of a Snapchat from Razorbacks forward Jacorey Williams. It’s a selfie with a simple caption explaining why his team lost “(sic) yall got luckyB.”
It’s a similar thing to what advanced statistician Ken Pomeroy tweeted about Florida a few times, calling them “#teambadluck.”
Florida shouldn’t have won this game, at least the way things have trended this season — remember, this is the team that has lost four games in which it has lead by double-digits.
This is not a team that makes just one of six shots in the final 5:22 — and goes scoreless in the final 3:50 — against an opponent that ends the game streaking on a 12-4 run and wins. It doesn’t miss three straight free throws at a crucial point in the game after nailing 15-20 to that point and pull out a victory. It doesn’t have its opponent miss a game tying free throw only to rebound the miss then drive to the basket and make a layup and still win.
But thanks to lady luck, that’s what happened.
With four seconds left, Chris Chiozza misses a layup that Michael Frazier, II rebounds.
As Frazier drives, he’s fouled on a bang-bang play that could have gone as a no-call. Frazier, to that point, had four points on 2-of-9 shooting. He stepped to the stripe, nailed two free throws and Florida escaped at home.
We try so hard to quantify things in sports. Sabermetrics, points per possession and effective field goal percentage among others all have helped us understand the game better as fans and as journalists, but there are some things that just don’t quite make sense.
Pomeroy’s statistics even attempt to quantify that seemingly unquantifiable thing: luck. According to his website KenPom.com, luck is “the deviation in winning percentage between a team’s actual record and their expected record using the correlated gaussian method.”
But even that leads you to confusion as #teambadluck, as Pomeroy calls them because they’re 333 in the country in his luck rating out of 351 teams in Division-1, got lucky and won.
Florida looked like they had gacked away another game — until they didn’t.
That’s this basketball team, a consistently difficult to pin down moving target.
Former BUCK linebacker Dante Fowler spoke to the media at halftime — we missed the first part of the second half which one writer turned to another and said “no big deal, we know how this one is gonna end.”
The script was there, but the final ebbs and flows of the game didn’t follow it.
This team may very well head to Memorial Gym Tuesday against Vanderbilt and get crushed by a sub-par Commodore team hopped up on Memorial Magic. Then it could come home and upset Kentucky at home next Saturday with College Gameday in attendance. Who knows? All the preparation in the world can’t account for one simple thing. Luck.
Follow Richard Johnson on Twitter @RagjUF
Chris Chiozza drives the ball down the lane during Florida's 57-56 win against Arkansas on Saturday in the O'Connell Center.
