UF losing ‘focus’ after second consecutive loss

GAINESVILLE — Florida suffered its second straight loss Saturday, but this one will be tougher to rebound from.

After losing for the first time in eight games Wednesday at South Carolina, the No. 19 Gators (14-5, 5-2) fell to Vanderbilt 68-66 in their first home loss of the season.

The C ommodores and Gators went back and forth all afternoon with 10 lead changes and nine ties, but Vanderbilt (9-10, 3-4) pulled away in the final minutes, despite one of the best perf o r mance s o f Ke Vau g h n Allen’s career.

UF coach Mike White was dejected after the game.

“O u r f o c u s n e e d s t o improve immensely,” White said. “We’ve know that all year. Now it needs to improve tenfold after we took about six steps backwards today.

“(In) our timeouts, we had some finger-pointing going on. A lot of immaturity showed up. Our culture has really improved, (but) today we had a lot of ugliness.”

White strongly criticized his team’s defensive effort and harped on the lack of c o mmuni c a t i o n s e v e r a l times. Vanderbilt shot 56.5 percent in the second half and attempted 25 3-pointers, making 10.

“I don’t know what to do. We’ve got to figure it out,” White said. “I’m at a complete loss of what to do with our communication level. The entire focus for thi s game, the entire scouting report, hours and hours and hours went into it. ... I guess I didn’t do a good enough job explaining it.

“We had eight or 10 miscommunications that led to open threes. It’s pretty simple. You yell switch, I yell switch. ... We were good (Friday) in practice. We were locked in this morning. It’s beyond me with the mistakes that we made defending when the game plan was that simple. It was the simplest plan that we’ve had all year.”

Florida ended the first half with a 10-2 run to take a 32-27 lead. But the Gators were outscored 41-34 in the second half as Vanderbilt’s Matthew Fisher-Davis and Nolan Cressler came up with big shots late.

“I don’t know who our team thinks that we are, but we’re not that,” White said. “Certain teams in our league and certain (teams) throughout the country in college basketball right about now head upward and some head downward. We want to be the first (to go up) and we weren’t.

“Now there’s a fork in the road. Do we panic? Do we point fingers? Do we blame each other? Or, do we simply man up and put some of our deficiencies on ourselves and find a way to get better. That obviously wasn’t our focus today, because we’ve defended at a much higher level than that several times this season.”

At least there was some good news for Florida. After four consecutive games scoring in double figures, Allen had been in a slump lately. The sophomore guard had combined for just 16 points in the last three games.

But Allen came alive Saturday, hitting a 3-pointer early and scoring 14 points in the first half. He finished with a season-high 29 points, but missed a corner 3 in the final seconds that could have won the game.

“KeVaughn was terrific. He was really good,” White said. ‘If he doesn’t throw in four or five high-degree-of-difficulty shots, the game wouldn’t have been close. They had their way with us, other than KeVaughn hitting some hard shots.

“I should have used a timeout (before Allen’s last shot). I had one left. I thought I could get down there in the corner and see if we had an open look and if not we could holler timeout. Before you know it, the ball was in the air to KeVaughn and we put him in a difficult situation. It was my fault.”