Florida finishes 18-0 vs non-conference opponents

The fact about this Florida team that I still can’t believe is that they had ZERO Top100 recruits on the roster.

I realize that with transfer/NIL most teams’ best players are highly recruited transfers that have blown up at smaller schools.

However, to simply have ZERO —even Freshmen or Sophomores who aren’t the stars hardly seems possible.

Forget the only team to every win the tourney with zero Top100 recruits on the roster.

I bet they’re the only SEC team period that didn't have at least one.

When WCJ went to Iona he was told by Pitino that "you're fat, you're slow, and you can't shoot."

downright impressive. also auburn had a hell of a team too considering they went toe to toe with yall in the tournament game

Good job gators

Florida did it right only playing a couple semi-challenging OOC games in November and December. Florida’s toughest OOC opponent was the same team that was Auburn’s 6th toughest.

The mantra over the past decade has been to play a challenging OOC slate because it will help you around Tournament time. And in the past, that was true. But with the way the SEC has improved in basketball, I’m not sure that’s still the case.

Auburn played Duke (1-seed), Houston (1-seed), Iowa State (3-seed), Purdue (4-seed), Memphis (5-seed), North Carolina (11-seed), and Ohio State (1st 8 out) all in November and December.

I felt like we peaked as a team in December when in a span of a week, we beat Ohio State by 38, beat Georgia State by 41, and then led a solid Purdue squad by 33 points with 7 minutes left in the game prior to putting in the bench kids.

We came back from Christmas break and just never looked quite the same. I think we were somewhat gassed and playing with slight injuries (especially Broome) before conference play even started. We were still good enough to go 15-3, but at no point did Auburn ever look as crisp in conference play as we did in Maui and in the week leading up to Christmas break.

Hindsight is 20/20, but knowing now how unbelievably difficult SEC play would be, I wish we had played a bit softer OOC schedule to save some of our energy for later in the season.

The semi-challenging part was a bit luck of the year on UFs part.

UVA
UNC
FSU
ASU
Wichita St
Wake Forest

In many other years, that would actually be a heck of a non-conference schedule

Yeah. UVA was the biggest surprise. Who would have thought that game would turn out to be a Quad 3?

I’m afraid Auburn is about to repeat last season again next year.

We’ll play 3 games in Vegas which appears to be a very impressive slate of teams… no matchups have been announced yet, but so far announced teams include Kansas, Iowa St, Baylor, Gonzaga, Michigan, Oregon, St John’s, et al, along with Auburn, Bama, Tennessee and A&M from the SEC.

We also play at Arizona, Purdue in Indy, plus the ACC challenge game.

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I think we can all agree Florida should have been the #1 overall seed. Hands down better than Auburn (‘s best team in program history).

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A few things with this troll of a post…

1. Florida was definitely the best team in the country at the end of the season, no question.

2. Auburn was and still should have been the #1 overall seed, and there is a reason why the Committee and every bracketologist had Auburn #1 and Florida #4 on their seed list. Auburn had 16 Quad 1 wins to Florida’s 11 going into the Tournament. Auburn was 15-3 in SEC play to Florida’s 15-4.

3. This was also Bama’s greatest team ever by every advanced statistic rating system, and you guys had zero trophies to show for. At least Auburn gets to hang an SEC Championship and a Final Four banner.

We were the only team to beat you in the Swamp.

We had all the ingredients for a final 4 and Gates turned those ingredients into meth.

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Honest question. Which team would you have first? If you consider the 15-4 team beat the 15-3 team on the road?

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Auburn. Without a doubt. You can’t go down the “who beat who” route for seeding, because you quickly then have to acknowledge Florida’s losses to the likes of Missouri and Georgia.

You can’t say, “Well Florida did beat Auburn head-to-head”, but then ignore Florida’s conference losses to some subpar teams.

NCAA seeding is mostly about resumes. Auburn’s resume was miles ahead of Florida’s going into the tournament.