Of the 10-15 programs that had the greatest impact on men’s college basketball over the past couple of decades, perhaps none entered the post-COVID world with a more uncertain long-term future than Florida.
In between 2014 and the season that wrapped up Monday night in San Antonio, Florida participated in a total of just five NCAA Tournaments. It was never seeded better than fourth, and it made the tournament’s second weekend just one time.
There was a general belief that UF was a program that had experienced a few nice moments over the years, caught lightning in a bottle for a brief stretch in the mid-2000s, and now was poised to live out the remainder of its basketball existence as a notable also-ran.
Such an existence would not have been atypical for Florida.
On a football-crazy campus, Gator basketball was always fighting an uphill battle when it came to trying to capture the complete attention of its fan base before late December. Before Billy Donovan arrived in Gainesville in 1996, the sport wasn’t even a post-holiday hobby.
Despite playing in a power conference since the inception of the SEC in 1932, Florida had played in just five NCAA Tournaments in its history. It had advanced past the opening weekend just twice before Donovan was hired.
The hiring of Donovan, who was just 31-years-old and (despite his slicked back hair) looked like he could have passed for 21, didn’t make much of an impact in the college basketball world initially. Donovan was a name, sure, but that was more from his playing days at Providence and his tight-knit relationship with his college coach, Rick Pitino. After spending five seasons as an assistant at Kentucky under Pitino, Donovan was hired as the head coach at Marshall where he went 35-20 over two seasons and never flirted with an NCAA Tournament appearance.
Despite the lack of anything resembling an initial splash, the hiring of Donovan ushered in an era of success in Gainesville that no one saw coming.
Under the direction of “Billy the Kid,” Florida made 14 trips to the Big Dance, won six SEC championships, advanced to the Final Four four times, and until 12 months ago, was the most recent program to win back-to-back national championships (2006-07).
As it tends to do, all that success came hand-in-hand with rumors of bigger and better things for the man responsible. Openings at programs like Kentucky and UCLA and a brief commitment by Donovan to become the new head coach of the Orlando Magic forced Florida fans to come face-to-face with the question of what their national powerhouse of a basketball program would look like without the man receiving the lion’s share of the credit for its rapid ascension.
They got to face that world head on when Donovan was finally lured away by the Oklahoma City Thunder in 2015. The departure came after a woeful 16-17 campaign, Donovan’s first losing season as a head coach since his second year in Gainesville.
Florida handed the keys to its car to Mike White. Like Donovan before him, White had been a head coach at just one stop prior to UF (Louisiana Tech), and had never coached a game in the NCAA Tournament. That was just about where the similarities ended.
The program didn’t fall off a cliff in the years immediately following Donovan’s departure, but it didn’t soar either. White took Florida to the NCAA Tournament in four straight years from 2017-2021, winning at least one game in the Big Dance each time. But there was just one trip past the second round, the team was never a serious contender for an SEC championship, and the Gators were just 10-15 in the month of March between 2017 and 2022. That’s when White pulled a “you can’t fire me, I quit” and bolted for Georgia.
Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin quickly turned his attention to Todd Golden, a head coach with a familiar profile.
Golden was 36, looked significantly younger, and had a forward-thinking approach to the game at basketball. At San Francisco, Golden had preached “Nerd Ball,” a term coined by previous USF head coach Kyle Smith, whom Golden worked under for three seasons. Emphasizing analytics and internal “hustle stats” specific to the program, Golden won 57 games in three seasons with the Dons, leading them to the NCAA Tournament as an at-large selection in 2022.
Questions from Gator fans about whether or not the approach could work at the power conference level were not initially met with a comforting answer. Florida went 16-17 in year one, losing in the first round of the NIT. They made the NCAA Tournament as a 7-seed a year later, losing to Colorado in the first round.
The 2024-25 season was supposed to be another small step forward for Golden and company. The Gators were No. 21 in the preseason AP top 25 poll, and picked to finish sixth in the SEC.
In an era of unprecedented roster turnover, Golden banked on roster retention being the key to a season of overachievement. He had been able to convince the five-player nucleus of his 2023-24 team, including All-American Walter Clayton Jr., to return to Gainesville for at least one more season.
“For us going from years two to three, one of the advantages that we thought we had going into the off-season was that we had some good young guys in our program,” Golden said at SEC Media Day last October. “But it all starts with the retention, and it all starts with that continuity, and any team that’s able to build continuity within their program I think is going to be a better chance of being successful.”
Golden added that if his team could advance in the NCAA Tournament and finish the season ranked higher than its preseason ranking of 21, it would be a nice way to show the fans that the program is back on the right track.
The program isn’t just back on the right track, it’s in position to be stronger than it’s ever been before.
Before this year, Florida’s most recent Final Four appearance had come back in 2014, the penultimate season of the Donovan era. When the No. 1 overall seed Gators were stunned by eventual national champion Connecticut in the semifinals, Golden was serving as the director of basketball operations — a staff position, but a non-coaching staff position — at Auburn. He was 28-years-old.
On Monday night, Golden became the youngest head coach to win a national championship since 37-year-old Jim Valvano and NC State shocked the world by stunning Houston at the buzzer. He put the ultimate bow on a season where Florida won 36 games, dominated the SEC tournament in the league’s strongest year ever, and then went on an unforgettable three-week run where it had to come from behind to win four of its six NCAA Tournament games.
It’s not an overstatement to say that the season, and the run, have changed everything about the profile and the reputation of Florida men’s basketball.
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Photo by Brett Wilhelm/NCAA Photos via Getty Images
Forget about the “football school” connotation or the lack of any major history before the mid-1990s, the Gators are now one of the 10 college basketball programs with three or more national titles. Furthermore, Florida and UConn are the only two programs in the sport with three or more national championships over the last 20 years. And if you want to bring gridiron talk into the mix, UF is also the only school in Division-I with at least three football and three men’s basketball championships.
Golden’s most recent victory may be the one that should provide the most comfort to Gator fans already looking to the future, and not just because it secured the statuses mentioned above.
Everyone already knew Golden was an offensive wunderkind. Florida finished last season 12th in the country in adjusted offensive efficiency and scored at least 90 points in a game 12 times this season. But in the most important game of his young career, Golden found a way to win by beating a fellow heavyweight at their own game.
No team loves dragging its opponents into the mud more than Houston. Kelvin Sampson’s Cougars have become the embodiment of culture and consistency at the college level. No future NBA stars, no five-star freshmen, not as much roster turnover as the average power conference program; Just a connected group of absolute dogs that have to be killed if they’re going to lose a fight.
On a night where its star was held mostly in check and the team shot just 6-of-24 and committed 13 turnovers, Florida still found a way. And it found a way against the one team that wins this type of game 98 times out of 100.
After seeming to be playing from 7-10 points behind for virtually the entire game, Florida strung together nine consecutive defensive stops at one point in the second half. After Houston answered UF’s haymakers with three consecutive makes to seemingly regain control, the Gators finished the game with five consecutive stops. None was more memorable or impressive than the last one.
Florida led the game for a grand total of 60 seconds. Their largest lead was the same as their final margin of victory: 2 points. They became just the second team in history to win a national championship game where they never held a two possession lead.
“This was an incredibly difficult team to come back against,” Golden said afterward. “A great team, a great program, a Hall of Fame coach. But our guys are resilient. We started getting some stops. I think we got nine in a row. We flipped the script of the game.”
Flipped the script of the game. Flipped the script of the program.
There’s no debate about it anymore: Florida has a seat at the table of the college basketball elite. So long as Golden stays in Gainesville, there doesn’t seem to be any reason why the Gators can’t inch closer to the head of that table in the years to come.