Florida basketball suffered its second loss of the 2024-25 campaign late Tuesday night against a Missouri Tigers squad that fought tooth-and-nail from the opening tipoff, 83-82.
[autotag]Walter Clayton Jr[/autotag]. opened up the scoring with a 2-point jumper on the first possession, but Mizzou responded with a 3-pointer. Clayton responded with a three of his own on the next possession, but that would be the last time the Gators held the edge on the scoreboard.
The Tigers extended the lead as far as 19 points before the home team chipped away for the final score.
After losing their first home game of the season, the Gators are now 2-2 in the Southeastern Conference and 15-2 overall. [autotag]Todd Golden[/autotag] talked to the media afterward, offering the following statements.
Opening Statement
“Obviously disappointed, got to give a lot of credit to Missouri, and thought they played harder than us. They were more ready to play than we were, and obviously jumped on us in the first half, and we were not ready for it – and obviously starts with me. I need to do a better job making sure we’re ready to go, and making sure that we understand what’s in front of us.
“Obviously, this is a very good team that we played tonight, 3-1 in the league, 14-3 overall smacked Kansas at home. Coach Gates did a great job of putting this team together, bouncing back off the season last year and building a tournament team. Just really disappointed by our lack of enthusiasm, energy, whatever you want to call it, the first half. And obviously I thought we were pretty resilient in the second half.
“But, you know, building a 1-point hole at home or anywhere for that matter, is a really bad strategy when winning is the goal. Got to use this as a learning experience. First time this year where we feel kind of disappointed about, just our the way we execute our effort, the way we attack the game – and doesn’t get any easier in this league. We got to get back and get ready for Saturday against Texas.”
On team growing from loss
“I don’t think we’ll ever look at it fondly, but if we’re able to get back to being the gritty, competitive team that plays with the chip on their shoulder and is the more physical team, which we’ve been, pretty much every time we played this year, then, it won’t be the end of the world. You know that we lose tonight and we have to.
“We just have no other choice if we don’t bounce back and kind of find that we will struggle through the rest of this conference season. I don’t anticipate that being an issue. These guys are obviously, they’ve been great all year. It’s hard to be good. We talk about that a lot.
“And the disappointing thing is, this team has been pretty consistent with the effort and the physicality and to Missouri’s credit. I thought they laid it on us in the first half, and we seemed like we were a little surprised, caught off guard. I don’t know if we felt like we could just kind of go play that it would all work out.
“But to Missouri’s credit, they said the terms of the game early on, and it took us too long to battle back and to find a way.”
On what Missouri did defensively
“Yeah I mean, they just pressure, they pressure, they deny, they do a good job of taking away the wings. They take away your middle-of-the-floor catches, and I didn’t think we were physical enough to own that real estate to get those catches.
And, you know, Coach Gates worked with Leonard Hamilton at Florida State, and they guard very similar to how Florida State guards. And, you know, earlier in the year, we had some issues against them with turnovers, but we were able to be physical and play off two to be able to execute off of threes.
“Obviously, in the second half, we were a lot better, we scored 48 points in the second half. But you know that first half, it rattled us and we weren’t able to execute the way we needed to to win.”
On Missouri’s defensive pressure
“Yeah, it’s the way the game goes. You know, when you turn it over, they get easier run-outs in transition. You know, I thought we handled their baseline out-of-bounds defense really poorly, something we talked about, worked on, and we simply didn’t provide a good enough plan to execute.
“But there were a lot of little things over the course of 40 minutes that we are generally pretty good at, that tonight, we just weren’t. Turnovers, timely free throws, whatever it is, you can point to a lot of different things, but, you know, we were knocking on the glass tonight. We turned it over a lot, you know, there’s a lot of different reasons as to why we didn’t perform the way we needed to. But again, Missouri deserves credit for the way they bothered us.”
On his decision with 38.5 seconds remaining
“Yeah, we thought about it, yeah, thought about it. We’re right there, getting that steal, too, in front of the scorer’s table away from our bench, you know, the reality is, you play it out, though, and they make a shot, then the clock, the game’s over.
“So I’d rather, you know, try to find a way to get a possession or two more in the game and see what happens. You know, when teams are trying to bleed clock, sometimes they play on their heels. You might be able to get a steal, which we were very close to getting, you know, it’s just a 50/50 decision that we made. ”
On uncharacteristic things from Mizzou early
“We weren’t great early but to your point. I mean, Caleb Grill made some ridiculous shots, you know, and I think at least three of those four makes were relatively contested, and sometimes just got to tip your cap and stay the course.
“But they were playing very confident, you know, and he kind of got them going. I thought Crew hit a big three in that run, and, you know, got down 19 in the first half, you know, before we knew it just like that, you know, we did not take away the rim well enough. It was comfortable, you know.
“But again, I thought they played very, very well. It was – we didn’t do a good enough job, not even close, but at the same time, Missouri is a good team. They came in here and played very well, you know, with Grill, and we talk about it every time, you know, I’m with you guys, we talk about three-point defense. What do I say?
“It’s less about, you know, being able to contest it – you can’t let them get it up. If you want to control the three-point game, you can’t let them get it up. And even 10 threes after Grill is a terrible formula, he’s a very good shooter. And you know, he can shoot you out of a game like he did tonight. And our goal is to always limit three-point makes for opponents.
“You know, allowing them to come in here and make 11 was one of the differences in the game.”
On Gators rallying in second half
“I thought our effort in the second half was way better. We outscored them by 15. We played a lot better, but too little too late. One thing that we talked about a lot with our guys is we are the team that has been able to get where nobody thought we could go.
“We are a team of guys that are not supposed to be at Florida, whether it’s our players or our coaches. We are the underdogs, we have the chip on our shoulder and tonight was the first time all year that I did not feel that we competed with that mentality. And that’s something that we gotta get back for Saturday.”
On Caleb Grill stepping on line
“We were not made aware of it. I mean, I guess we could have talked to the refs. We didn’t see it. I didn’t see it, at least. And that’s on me. But yeah, normally we would have. Just like we did with the hook and hold call, we would go talk to the officials.”
If he still had a review to ask for
“Usually, if you ask them on foot on the line shots, they’ll go look at a timeout. You gotta tell them right away, though. But with the reviews, they are tricky.”
On two missed free throws by Clayton late
“Very uncharacteristic. But, you know, the reality is that was one possession of a probably 75-possession game. And it’s easy to point at things like that when you lose by one, but that was definitely not the reason why we lost. There were a lot of other things that were way more important that we just weren’t able to execute.”
Mizzou’s physicality vs rallying from 16 down
“Both. They just played with a lot of pop. They came out and they were ready to go. I’ve been a little concerned about our group in terms of we’ve just had some very emotional games lately. Really all three of our conference games so far had been very emotional and this was, for lack of a better term, a trap situation.
“We as a staff, as a program, did not think of it as a trap game. Missouri’s very good. They’re tournament team, but coming home, you know, people say, ‘Oh, the schedule is lighting up.’ It’s just not accurate in this league. Every night is gonna be a quad one or quad two opportunity. Every team has guys that are potential pros, every team for the most part is fighting for an NCAA tournament seed right now. And there’s just no easy games.
“And when you come into the game with the wrong mentality, you leave yourself susceptible to a situation like tonight where you put yourself in a really big hole and you have to dig out. But we just did not match their enthusiasm. We didn’t match the physicality and we just allowed them to come into our building to get comfortable, which just doesn’t happen very often.”
Next up for Florida
The Gators remain at home to host the Texas Longhorns on Saturday, Jan. 18. Tipoff is scheduled for 4 p.m. ET and the game will be broadcast on ESPN2.
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