The exhausting season is as good as over for Gator fans. Yes, there will be an NIT appearance, but the interest level will be somewhere between Olympic curling and Little League baseball.
Florida won’t be in the NCAA Tournament and the anti-Mikeys are ready for another burning at the stake. Hey, the fans figure that if you could fire three up-and-down football coaches in seven years you can fire a coach who has had seven years to get the program where YOU want it.
And you want it to compete for national championships and SEC crowns, not playing in the NIT. The nattering nabobs of negativity will point to the bookends of White’s career at UF – NIT the first year, NIT this year.
That doesn’t sound like a program trending upwards.
There is this to remember – the last time Florida fired a coach who wasn’t facing NCAA penalties was John Lotz in 1979. I’m not counting the two interim coaches (Ed Visscher and Don “Captain Ahab” DeVoe). Norm Sloan was fired for NCAA violations, Lon Kruger left for another job and so did Billy Donovan. Twice.
And if you are ready to kick Mike White to the curb, he’ll have to supply the boot.
Florida isn’t going to fire White. He might leave of his own accord because he has grown weary of fans who love to complain but are apathetic when it comes to supporting the program.
Of course, that is his choice. And please don’t make the comparison to Dan Mullen or Jim McElwain. They were both fired by Scott Stricklin because of issues other than wins and losses.
White is running a clean program going up against teams in his own conference who do not. And he has yet to have a losing record in regular-season SEC play.
The program is not broken. It is damaged. But not irreparably.
He still gets his players to go hard all the time, still holds them accountable in everything they do, still creates a culture of doing things the right way.
So, if he does not leave – and I am just speculating that he might – what are Gator fans to do?
With a lot of them, there is no such thing as blind loyalty. They see the warts and want them removed surgically. They just went through a season that frustrated them to a new level and they want change.
They see a coach who is good, not great. They want great, even though they have no idea who could come in here and do what Billy Donovan did. Yeah, basically, they want another Billy.
Who doesn’t?
They are difficult to come by.
There is no doubt that White needs to reexamine things. He invested deeply in the transfer portal and it backfired. That’s on the staff because Florida ended up with a team that relied on three-point shooting and players who weren’t very good at it.
He needs to make better choices there. And he needs to look hard at a staff that never had a difficult time getting guys to play smart but certainly had a difficult time getting guys to play connected for long stretches.
It was those long stretches of bad basketball that did Florida in this year. How you can have a team playing in its 32nd game be so disconnected defensively in the first half of a do-or-die game is mind-boggling.
Anyone can sit and come up with a long list of excuses for this team – the best player couldn’t practice and played games with one good arm, his back-up was lost for the season with a bizarre eye injury, the Keyontae hangover won’t go away.
But excuses don’t cut it around Gainesville.
Mediocrity doesn’t either.
The one thing the pro-Mikey fans had going for them was an annual trip to the NCAA Tournament, and if you don’t think that is hard to do, ask Kentucky. Not going this year is a step back.
It doesn’t mean Florida’s basketball program can’t take a big step forward next season.
But it won’t be easy.
The SEC top to bottom is the best it’s ever been. White will have to lean on the portal again and he’s not going to get his pick of the transfers. He just has to pick the right ones.
And if he is still Florida’s coach next year, there will be a high percentage of the Gator Nation that will greet the start of the season with a shrug. Florida fans like basketball. They just aren’t passionate about it.
They want what they had with Billy. They want the Oh-Fours. They want a team that can win 30 straight games or comes out of nowhere to get to the Final Four like the 1994 team did.
And that is the overwhelming sentiment among the anti-Mikeys – is Mike White the coach to make Florida basketball great again?
It certainly does make next season the most important yet for White.
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