The Florida Gators got a big win without even playing Sunday as the NCAA tournament’s South Region spit out another highly regarded team.
Kansas, the region’s No. 2 seed, got kicked to the curb by Stanford in the Round of 32. That, in combination with earlier losses by Syracuse, VCU and Ohio State, eliminated most of the headliners that seemed to stand between the Gators and the Final Four when the brackets were first announced little more than a week ago.
Now comes the Sweet 16 round in Memphis and an opponent that the Gators have made a habit of kicking around in the NCAA tournament.
There will be plenty of time between now and Thursday night’s game to analyze No. 4 seed UCLA, the team that knocked off Arizona in the championship game of the Pac-12 tournament and outclassed surprising Stephen F. Austin 77-60 on Sunday.
The 28-8 Bruins, catching fire under first-year coach Steve Alford, are a genuine handful and will demand the best of the top-seeded Gators.
There’s really no need, however, to dwell on UCLA’s regal tradition. The last of the Bruins’ record 11 national titles was in 1995, back when the stars of Florida’s storied senior class were just toddlers.
What’s more, Florida has been the team to eliminate UCLA in three of the Bruins’ last six NCAA tournament appearances.
The first time of those times (2006) was in the national championship game, the second (2007) was in the national semifinal and the third (2011) was a Round of 32 game in which Patric Young and Scottie Wilbekin actually contributed some important minutes off the bench as freshmen.
There’s nothing that says the Gators can’t end the Bruins’ season again, even though UCLA snapped Stephen F. Austin’s 29-game winning streak like a twig on Sunday and treated Tulsa almost as roughly on Friday.
Florida earned the No. 1 overall seed in the tournament for a multitude of reasons and they’re all still valid after dumping Albany and Pittsburgh by an average of 14 points over the weekend in Orlando.
The whittling of the field from 68 teams to just 16 teams has even brought renewed respect for the Gators’ 18-0 SEC championship run, too. Between the Gators, Kentucky and Tennessee, the SEC is 7-0 in the tournament. That includes a play-in game the Vols had to win over Iowa just to get a foothold in the regular Midwest Region bracket.
March Madness changes its personality with each new matchup, however, and the Gators will need to shift gears from the tractor pull of the Pittsburgh game to a more athletic sprint with the Bruins.
Here’s an important clue for what it might be like. UCLA, a guard-oriented team that likes to run, played twice this season against Arizona. The Bruins scored 75 points in each of those games, one of them a victory and one them a loss.
Since Arizona and Florida are often mentioned together as the best defensive teams in America, it stands to reason that the Gators won’t do much better than that in holding UCLA down over 40 frantic minutes. That means Florida will need to pump up its scoring. The Gators haven’t hit 70 points yet in the tournament and have gone over 75 just once in the last seven games.
Michael Frazier II can take care of that all by himself by regaining his touch from three-point range. He’s 3-of-13 in the tournament so far but has been thrown off rhythm by slow-paced games in which his favorite opportunities, the ones that come in transition, have been few. The Bruins, who were outrebounded by Stephen F. Austin on Sunday and don’t have much of a post presence, set up nicely for the triggering of more Florida fast breaks.
It will be entertaining no matter what, especially when Wilbekin tests his defensive skills against UCLA’s Kyle Anderson, who does quite a bit of the ballhandling at 6-feet-9.
Billy Donovan’s got a little time to work on that, of course, and everything else that makes UCLA a legitimate threat.
When a coach is 33-11 lifetime in NCAA tournament play, it figures he might have some fairly effective ideas.
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