So why should I feel good about Gators basketball moving forward?

He's been getting some PT since Colin went down, and managing well. Nothing jumps out, but he's been steady. He'll be in the regular rotation next season for sure.

 

I hardly saw anything out of him. He didn’t get enough playing time to judge him. However, he was an excellent player in his senior year of high school against a really tough schedule.

 

Article on Gatorsports with how much SEC teams spend on basketball. We are next to last. Only MSU spends less. We are 9th in recruiting spending. So I guess finishing 8th in the league shows we are out-performing!

Total operating expenses
Here is a school-by-school look at SEC total operating expenses for basketball in 2021-22:

• Kentucky: $22,116,208
• Tennessee: $14,659,954
• Georgia: $14,127,220
• Auburn: $13,813,576
• Texas A&M: $13,524,047
• Ole Miss: $13,026,006
• Arkansas: $11,802,170
• South Carolina: $11,792,522
• Alabama: $10,900,723
• Missouri: $10,286,792
• LSU: $9,849,325
• Florida: $8,815,741
• Mississippi State: $8,384,574

How much each SEC program spends on basketball, recruiting

 

Don’t we use a school plane?

 

I didn't exactly do a deep dive into the data. Just cut and pasted the article.

 

If you add $200,000 for recruiting flights, we move up to #5.

 

What's funny is UGA spend so much money in recruiting and still suck!

 

Figured Ky and UT at the top but uga and ole miss are much higher than I would have thought based on fan support and results.

 

If you look at the total budget, it will be inflated in some cases by fired coaches who are being paid off. Our budget would be higher if we fired White.

 

Wrll, that's the money we know about. I just can't see places like Fayetteville and Birmingham as a goto for kids dreaming about playing hoops, LOL.

 

Those numbers aren’t meaningless, but how schools allocate collective costs varies. I wouldn’t take it as gospel. And some of those schools were paying off coaches fired in that number too.

as for Golden, we will see how fast a learner he is, and how he makes the roster over this year. Jury is still out. But this year went roughly like I thought it would prior to CC’s injury. Bubble team. Losing the close games swung it a bit to the downside. But he has a strategy on how to build, next year is when we start to see if it works.

 

But do we know what flights other programs use?

 

I don’t know, but there are a pile of variables in play here that make the gross numbers basically irrelevant. Georgia is paying Tom Crean millions of dollars, while we are paying Mike White nothing. Our facilities cost is divvied up among numerous sports teams. Our coaching costs are lower than some other teams because we have a new coach at a somewhat lower cost. Also, what level of sustained success have the other SEC teams had in the last 10 years? The Gators went to 3 Elite 8’s and a Final
four in a 4-year stretch from 2010-2014. It sure seems like it’s more who your coach is rather than how much money you spend.

 

I agree, it's not a simple apples-to-apples comparison as some would have us believe.
I've always felt that a coach in any collegiate sport should get a full 4 years of recruiting classes and seasons before you fire them, as long as progress is observable and no shenanigans are going on.

 

Our so-called lack of financial resources didn’t stop us from having a roster a few years ago that included Nembhard, Mann, Lewis, Keyontae, Blackshear and a few other solid players. We started the season ranked 6th in the country and ended the season at 19-12 and unranked. That’s when I first felt that it was time to move on from White.

 

Spot on, fair or way off?

Florida basketball: It’s not quite time to panic over Todd Golden, but the questions are growing louder

 

Seems fair. Obviously Golden didn’t inherit a team set up for championships. He inherited a team not much better than 16-16. But at the end of the day, given the pieces he convinced to stay and the portal pickups, 16–16 is pretty damn poor. I think 20 wins was probably “par”. In the old days a new coach might come in to a devastated roster and managing 16-16 would be great coaching. Can’t really say that here.

But at the same time, it’s just 1 year. I do think it’s pretty obvious he needs to show some recruiting chops and hopefully that translates to some on-court progress. He took a 18-20 win roster and won 16. While his offense at times looked more fluid than we’d seen in recent years, overall it just felt like an extension of the Mike White era. Of course losing Castleton probably cost us 2-3, but now Castleton is gone for good so obviously the question is what we look like next year. It certainly changed the character of our defense.

 

Agree, seems fair. He's going to have to charm his way into keeping Kugel and hauling in 2 difference makers.

 

It was a depressing column. Neil did a fine job of setting the table and reminding us of what we had during the salad days.

Later on he writes, "It also begs the question of why Florida seems hellbent on saving a dollar to chase the next diamond in the rough Billy Donovan-type hire when, thanks to the yeoman’s work of Lon Kruger and the court-signature work of Donovan, the Gators’ hoops program has won enough to have the pedigree to hire a proven commodity."

Pretty much spot on analysis.