Enough already
Gator Twitter trolls need to get off White’s back
As a kid growing up in Gainesville going to totally irrelevant Florida Gators basketball games at a musty, cramped, archaic old gym known as Alligator Alley, I’m ashamed of many of the Johnny-Come-Lately Gator fans of today.
I’m ashamed because they have no sense of historical perspective.
I’m ashamed because they are out of touch with reality.
Mostly, I’m ashamed about how they are treating Mike White — a good man, a good father, a good husband and, yes, a good basketball coach.
White says he doesn’t see or hear the mean-spirited, ridiculous, fire-the-coach criticism being heaped upon him by the idiotic minority of Gator fans on social media, who are freaking out after a loss to 15th-seeded Oral Roberts in the second round of the NCAA Tournament a couple of weeks ago and the resulting rash of UF players (four) who have since entered the transfer portal. White instead chose to take the high road when I asked him how he is handling the criticism from the legions of the miserable on Twitter.
“I love the passion of our fan base,” White says. “It’s part of what makes this place special. And obviously it puts a healthy pressure on every sport at the University of Florida to compete at the highest level.”
Actually, I question the actual
“passion” of UF’s basketball fan base. If these UF fans are filled with so much “passion” that they were calling for White to be fired after the upset loss in the NCAA Tournament, then why didn’t they attend the game against Oral Roberts — a tiny religious school that, by all accounts, had about five times as many fans in Indianapolis as the Gators did.
It’s astounding that UF’s lunatic fringe acts as if it’s unacceptable that the seventh-seeded Gators could lose to Oral Roberts. Yes, the same Oral Roberts that beat second-seeded Ohio State in the first round of the tournament and came within a missed 3-pointer at the buzzer of beating third-seeded Arkansas in the Sweet 16.
Fortunately, UF athletics director Scott Stricklin, who himself is very active on social media, has learned to ignore the many armchair ADs on his Twitter feed.
“Mike White is going to be the head coach at Florida for a long, long time,” Stricklin says. “To be great, you have to be consistently good. Very few schools in the country have been to the NCAA Tournament over the last few years like we have at Florida. And that’s because of Mike White.”
As somebody who grew up in this state and has been following Gator basketball my entire life, it irks me that so many in Gator Nation don’t have a clue about the history of the program. Do they not realize that Gator basketball has been irrelevant for most of its 100-year history?
I watched in the 1980s when Norm Sloan got UF put on NCAA probation and was fired in his illicit quest to make a schoolfirst NCAA Tournament nearly 70 years after the program was born . ... I watched Lon Kruger coach the Gators to the Final Four in 1994 only to see the bottom fall out two years later when the team went 12-16 and Kruger bolted to Illinois.
Sloan and Kruger each had a temporary pocket of success, but there was never any sustained excellence until former AD Jeremy Foley pulled Billy Donovan out of his hat.
Donovan was an elite basketball coach.
The University of Florida is not an elite basketball program.
For whatever reason, the lunatic fringe believes that Donovan’s back-toback national championships should be the trend instead of the once-in-alifetime accomplishment it was. You had a generational coach in Donovan coaching a generational bunch of NBA lottery picks who made the unprecedented decision to return to school and try to win consecutive national titles.
This will never, ever happen again.
Believe it or not, before those back-toback national championships, there were those among the lunatic fringe complaining that Donovan should be fired because he’d lost in the first weekend of five straight NCAA Tournaments. But as Billy D. himself used to say, “You have to be in it to win it.”
And White has lived up to that standard. He’s in it most every year. The expectation for a basketball program like Florida’s should be to make the tournament most every season and occasionally make a deep run. White made a deep run to the Elite Eight in his second season but has lost in the second round in every tournament since.
It amazes me how any knowledgeable UF basketball fan could be disappointed in these results. White has been at UF for six seasons and made the NCAA Tournament every season but his first. He actually made it this season when traditional powers Kentucky, Duke, Indiana and Louisville couldn’t.
And he did it in the most disrupted, distracting season in the history of college basketball. White got the Gators to the NCAA Tournament in a COVID-cursed campaign when his best player, Keyontae Johnson, frighteningly collapsed on the court early in the season and never played again.
Florida is the only program in the SEC to make the last four NCAA Tournaments, and White is one of only five coaches in the country to have won at least one tournament game in four consecutive tournaments. Is that something you hang banners for? Of course not, but it certainly shows a level of consistency within a college basketball program.
And White has done it without the FBI wire-tapping his phone and without a hint of the cheating and chicanery that pervades the cesspool of college basketball. Yes, White could go wading in the sewer with cheaters like LSU coach Will Wade and probably win more games, but he refuses to do it. Thank God.
“By every objective measure, Mike is killing it,” says White’s brother — new Tennessee athletics director Danny White. “I like to think everybody in our family has a high level of integrity. We’re never going to break the rules and we’re never going to take shortcuts. I hate the level of cheating in college basketball and we need to clean up the sport. Mike has always done things the right way. He’s not going to break the rules and he’s not going to lie to kids.”
Which brings us to the four players who have decided to transfer from Florida. White probably could have kept two of the more promising players — reserve big man Omar Payne and starting shooting guard Noah Locke — from entering the transfer portal, but he simply would not make them any guarantees. Payne, according to UF sources, wanted to be assured that he would be the starting center next season while Locke wanted a guarantee that he could play some point guard and be the team’s featured scorer.
“Mike figured it would be better for team chemistry and culture if he just let them transfer rather than meet their demands or lie to them,” said one UF source.
Besides, it’s not like Florida is the only team where players are entering the transfer portal in record numbers. Ten of the 14 SEC teams have multiple players in the portal, with Ole Miss leading the way with six.
When Baylor and Houston meet in the Final Four Saturday, they will start more transfers (six) than they will players they signed out of high school (four). Transfers, according to Sports Illustrated, account for 52% of Baylor’s playing time and 54% of its points this year. Houston transfers have scored 61% of the team’s points and accrued 121 of the team’s 155 total starts.
Moreover, SI reports, nearly 1,100 basketball players are in the transfer portal this season. With each of the 340 Division 1 teams allotted 15 scholarship spots, this means one-fourth of basketball scholarship players are in the portal. And the numbers will continue to skyrocket next season when a new NCAA rule will likely be passed in which college athletes are allowed to transfer to another school without having to sit out a season.
“We have entered a new reality when teams remake their rosters every year out of the portal,” Danny White says.
Says Stricklin: “Recruiting the portal is becoming just as important as recruiting high school kids. Probably more so.”
Although nobody will say it, it’s obvious in today’s transient world of college basketball that more and more coaches are encouraging players to enter the transfer portal because those same coaches believe they can get better players out of the transfer portal.
Of course, the lunatic fringe doesn’t understand any of this.
Which is why smart ADs ignore their advice.
When I asked Stricklin the other day about whether he ever feels pressure from the Fire-MikeWhite critics on his Twitter feed, he recited a classic quote once uttered by the late, great Buddy Ryan.
“When you start listening to the fans,” Stricklin says, “you wind up sitting with them.”
If only these BillyCome-Lately Gator fans had sat with me all those decades ago in a musty, cramped, archaic old gym known as Alligator Alley ...
Then maybe they would appreciate Mike White.