The Gators’ men’s basketball team finished their season with an early departure from the NCAA tournament, being eliminated in the round of 32 in an upset by Oral Roberts. The team was promptly dismantled, losing two players to the draft and four to the transfer portal. Mike White has his work cut out for him to get Florida back to a roster of respectable players, and the bulk of that work will be done on the transfer market.
Florida struck quickly, adding Brandon McKissic and CJ Felder to the fold, and reportedly maintaining contact with several others. The Gators also cracked the finalists’ list for hotly pursued guard Jarrod West before eventually losing out to Louisville. Clearly, the team has no interest in losing out for a lack of trying.
It doesn’t come as much surprise, then, when Florida surfaced as one of the teams in contact with forward Isaih Moore, a transfer from St. John’s. A priority JUCO prospect a year ago, he upped his game against mid-major competition and entered the transfer portal again. This time, one would assume, he’s looking for a shot with a high major program where he can challenge himself again.
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It appeared he’d get his chance. On March 31st, he sent a tweet indicating the two schools he’d chosen as finalists – the Florida Gators and the Cincinnati Bearcats. Things got strange, then, when the tweet disappeared, leaving no credible evidence that the Gators had reached out to him whatsoever.
At first I wondered whether I had just imagined it in the first place. After all, reading about so many transfers can cause a few players to blend together in one’s mind. However, the tweet appears to have made its way onto a few college news forums, for example, this 247Sports comment section and this quick piece from the Bearcats’ angle.
What muddies the waters even more is the ambiguous wording of the tweet. “My momma told me pop my shi and do my dance… I did,” wrote Moore. It’s not uncommon to have these sorts of messages included with athletes’ recruitment news, but it also doesn’t directly reference either school he had indicated were the finalists in the attached (and now impossible to retrieve) image.
So are the Gators likely to bring Moore into the fold after all? That’s the million-dollar question, and it’s one I simply don’t have a good answer for. On the one hand, his skillset is an awkward fit for the Gators’ roster and doesn’t mesh with the way Mike White likes to play basketball. Additionally, the Gators already brought in CJ Felder to back up Anthony Duruji at the power forward position, which may have made it tough to find playing time for Moore.
On the other hand, White has said time and time again that he wants to play faster and Moore can be devastating in transition. It’s also strange to publicly announce that a school is a finalist when that team has no interest.
At the end of the day, we may never know the real truth, but that won’t stop us from wondering.
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