The Gators men’s basketball team’s season has been difficult to describe with the team reaching a high of beating a top-five team to the lows of several double-digit losses. All of this from a team that was ranked sixth in the country in the preseason AP poll.
But for once, Florida met expectations on Saturday.
Granted, those expectations were “Beat the worst team in the SEC that also hasn’t won a conference game since 2018,” but UF held up its end of the deal.
It was ugly, and the Gators didn’t cover the 12.5-point spread, but Florida did manage to pick up its second road win of the season. Nothing more, nothing less.
Nobody is going to point to the Gators’ 61-55 win over a Vanderbilt team, that is about as strong as a wet piece of paper, as the beginning of a turnaround. However, it successfully avoided a trap game against the Commodores, and that’s what matters at this point.
That will be important moving forward because Florida has a Charmin-soft schedule over the next four games. None of the teams the Gators will face are in the top half of the SEC standings, and only Georgia, which faces Florida in Gainesville on Wednesday, is in KenPom’s top 100 teams (No. 96).
Concluding that the Gators’ defense is back after a mostly strong outing against the Commodores’ pathetic offense is foolish, but it at least came out of hibernation the night before Groundhog Day. Florida had allowed at least 70 points in its last three games and five of its previous eight. But on Saturday night, UF limited Vanderbilt to just 55 points and just .887 points per possession.
Florida’s offense and defense have alternated between being good and bad on what has felt like a nightly basis. The Gators have scored at least 70 points 13 times this season and given up fewer than 65 points 10 times. But they have only done both in the same game five times this season.
Already 21 games into the season, Florida is still lacking consistency at both ends of the court.
But forward Keyontae Johnson has emerged as one of the few players on UF’s roster that can show up offensively and defensively on any given day. The sophomore is second on the team with 13.3 points per game, and he has scored at least 10 in five of his last six games. Johnson scored 20 points for the second time in three games on Saturday.
The sophomore has also been a threat on the glass, averaging 6.5 rebounds in his last four games after picking up seven against Vanderbilt.
“This game was important,” Johnson said in a release. “Again, we tried mainly to focus on our defense. We did good in the first half, slacked off a little bit in the second, but we were still able to get some big stops near the end.”
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Keyontae Johnson
