Florida's Schedule -- Sweet 16 says it was brutal

Hmm. Florida went 1 for 6 against those teams. Can’t fault Florida for having a soft schedule but it’s what you do with those opportunities that counts.

 

Also consider other teams we played that made the tournament:

Kennesaw St
Kentucky (2)
Miss St (2)
Mizzou
Auburn
West Virginia
aTm (2)

That's 16 games against tourney teams! Wow.

 

I have been commenting on our schedule all year,
Just add Kentucky, Miss St., Missouri, Auburn, Texas A & M, West Virginia, Oklahoma and Vandy, our schedule was brutal!

 

Maybe someday someone will think their schedule was brutal because they had to play the Gators.

 

I come up with 17 games, based on the info provided above.

 

In the future (for now, at least), this has to be dialed back some.

It serves no purpose to subject them to this when they don't have the talent to win many of these games.

The league is hard enough.

When the program is rebuilt and consistently recruits and develops top tier talent, then adjust the schedule accordingly.

 

Pretty sure we played TN only once this year.

 

You're right. I've fixed my post.

 

And the best game we played all year.

 

Playing an easier schedule may make sense if you keep having high roster turnover. An easier schedule could result in more total wins and give a team a chance to develop and to gain confidence while picking up likely wins.

However, there may be two cases this season when playing a too easy schedule could backfire:

(1) LSU was nearly undefeated in the nonconference season but struggled and flamed out in the conference season.

(2) Vanderbilt did very well in the conference season but their NCAA Net ultimately kept them out of the NCAA Tournament. Many teams did not play enough quality teams and pick up enough quality wins.

If you think that you have a veteran team coming back that can win championships (i.e 2014 Florida or 2007 Florida) then you could spice it up by taking on all top-contenders.

 

Of those 17 games we only won 4.

 

Agree with this.

We're so far away from that though, that other than driving up our losses, it does little.

If anything it impacts confidence and I think it hurt us there pretty badly this season. If you look at the margins too, it was very much a factor.

 

Mississippi State played a pretty easy OOC schedule until they played and beat Marquette neutral site. Then they beat TCU at home in the Big Twelve-SEC challange.

Losing record in the SEC and gets a bid.

The secret is to schedule just a couple of OOC "hard" games that you can win and win them. Even if Duke and Kansas were not all that this year scheduling to play them on their home courts would be just stupid.

 

Too many tough games, too many blowout losses to good teams really took a toll on this team's psyche.

I think we all know how much confidence matters in this game (and in athletics, in general).

 

We played 3 of the four of the elite 8 teams from tonight.

 

The team this year seemed to dominate against the teams they out manned and played equally as bad against those they were over matched against. If this is a start to a trend the next few years could separate the fans from the demands.

 

And 16 not.

 

I think this really could have hurt us if Castleton hadn't gotten hurt. It became a moot point when CC went down.

Before CC's injury, I was feeling pretty optimistic about a strong finish to the season and I was thinking then that the mediocre record could keep us out of the Tourney even if we may have deserved a bid more than some teams that got in (e.g., I think it was Miss St who was sub-.500 in the SEC and also didn't have a great record in Quad 1 but everyone was high on them).

At the time CC got injured, I thought we were really improving and in particular Castleton was turning into an absolute beast as he was becoming more and more aggressive (and at the same time he seemed to be missing far fewer of the "bunnies" that he used to miss fairly frequently - and very annoyingly ).

 

Well, the conference games are out of our control, but the non-conference schedule definitely was far too challenging for the level of the team that we put on the court.