Florida Basketball: Todd Golden Era officially begins tonight

The Mike White era of Florida basketball was best summed up by the Florida Gators being respectable but far from a power within the world of college basketball. Fair or unfair, White consistently had competitive teams but it became obvious his ceiling was the round of 32 in the NCAA tournament.

White left in the offseason to take over Georgia, a program that is happy by making the tournament once every few years and not having a scandal. But in Gainesville, the expectations are a bit higher for basketball. Still not quite as high as football, but as Florida basketball enters a new era the expectations of the old era remain.

Todd Golden has no choice but to meet and surpass those expectations if he expects to stick around for years to come.

Florida Basketball: It just means more

In the SEC, football is king and nobody is going to dispute that. While the conference has gotten more competitive over the years in the sport with the orange and round ball, several SEC schools don’t quite have the same expectations for basketball as they do football.

Georgia and Alabama top this list. The Crimson Tide had a good run a couple of years ago, but I would challenge most Alabama fans to name the starting five from that squad. Georgia looked at Mike White and said “Yep, that’s the guy we want.”

Beyond Kentucky, Florida might be the one school in the SEC that has actual expectations for its basketball program. Schools like Tennessee and Auburn have had great success in recent years, but if those programs returned to Earth there wouldn’t be despair like there is with football.

For Florida basketball, the decision to hire Todd Golden is a fair one but one that does come with risk. At 37 years old, Golden is the youngest head coach in the SEC. And this season with the Florida Gators will be just his four seasons as an NCAA D1 head coach after spending three years at the helm with the University of San Francisco.

Two of his three years at USF (the one out west, not the one that just fired its football coach) were successful and last year he led the Dons to the NCAA tournament, something White failed to do in Gainesville.

USF was a high-scoring team last year, averaging 76.3 points per game (33rd best in the country). Florida was 163rd in the country with 70.6 points per game. The Dons were top 60 in the country last year in the percentage of points coming from three-pointers while Florida was outside the top 100. USF west had an offensive efficiency (aka points per possession) that was ranked 51st while the Gators were 131st.

All these metrics point to a team that should have more offensive sets this season than iso-guard, but right now that is all on paper.

Florida basketball opens tonight as a 24.5-point favorite against Stony Brook and is a -10000 money line favorite to win outright. A win tonight will act as chapter one in Todd Golden’s story in Gainesville, but it won’t define it. As a reference point, the Mike White era began in 2015 with a 59-41 win over Navy.

Gator Nation is ready to return to its Golden Era in basketball when it won back-to-back national titles. Whether Todd Golden is the man to make that era happen remains to been seen.

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