No, Gator Nation, that was not basketball coach Mike White fondly waving goodbye or giving you a cheerful thumbs-up sign as he left town on Sunday to take the head coaching job at Georgia.
That was a big, fat extended middle finger if I’ve ever seen one.
That was Mike White essentially saying: “Not only am I leaving this spoiled-rotten, constantly complaining basketball fan base, but I’m leaving for the worst program in the SEC — and your biggest rival, to boot — because anything is better than dealing with you people.”
And, no, I’m not talking about all Gator basketball fans because, quite frankly, there aren’t that many true Gators basketball fans. I’m talking about a very vocal segment of the fan base, those who only started paying attention to UF basketball when Billy Donovan won back-to-back national titles. Those unrealistic fans created a noxious negativity that made White’s decision — a decision to go Gladys Knight and flee on the midnight train to Georgia — the absolute best option for both parties.
White gets a fresh start with a downtrodden SEC program that will gladly accept what he provided in Gainesville: An honorable man who represents the program in a first-class manner and a good coach who makes the NCAA tournament most years and occasionally makes a run in the tournament as well.
As for the Gators, they get a chance to buy another lottery ticket and hope it comes up Billy Donovan.
Good luck on that.
As someone who has been attending and/or covering UF basketball games since I was a kid, I know what the program was like before Billy D. It was, in a word, pathetic. It was former coach Stormin’ Norman Sloan getting the program put on NCAA probation in his win-at-all-cost quest to make a school-first NCAA tournament nearly 70 years after the program was started. It was Sloan’s successor, Lon Kruger, catching lightning in a bottle and taking the Gators to the Final Four in 1994 only to see the program collapse two years later when the team went 12-15 and Kruger bolted to Illinois.
Former AD Jeremy Foley then brilliantly hired a young Donovan, who turned the Gators into a national powerhouse. In his 19 amazing years, Donovan reached 14 NCAA tournaments, won two national championships and played for another national title.
But if I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a million times:
Billy Donovan was an elite basketball coach.
Florida is not an elite basketball program.
In fact, I’m here to tell you that Mike White is the second-best coach in UF history. If you take Donovan out of equation and take away two of Sloan’s NCAA tournament appearances that were vacated because of NCAA probation, White advanced to more NCAA tournaments (four) than all other coaches combined for in the 105-year history of UF’s program. In White’s seven seasons as Donovan’s successor, he ranked 19th in all-time SEC winning percentage among conference coaches.
And as great as Donovan was, it’s not like he left the program in tip-top shape before jumping to the NBA. The Gators were 16-17 in Donovan’s final season and then White came in and took UF to four NCAA tournaments in five years, including an Elite Eight run in his second season.
White made the NCAA tournament every season at UF except his first and his last, including a stretch of four straight tournament appearances that ended last year. And yet all you heard from the many miserable UF fans was carping and complaining about their head coach.
Even last season, when Florida became the only program in the SEC to make a fourth consecutive NCAA tournament, UF fans weren’t satisfied. They barbecued White after his seventh-seeded Gators lost to 15th-seeded Oral Roberts — the same Oral Roberts that beat second-seeded Ohio State in the first round and came within a missed 3-pointer at the buzzer of beating third-seeded Arkansas in the Sweet 16.
I believe that’s when White became utterly disenchanted with the callousness of Gator Nation’s social-media mob. The UF coach was devastated that the Twitter trolls gave no acknowledgment to the fact that he was able to get the Gators into the tournament despite an emotionally wracked season in which his best player, Keyontae Johnson, collapsed on the court, nearly died and has never played again.
His critics also constantly pointed out that White could have and should have recruited better. And maybe he would have if he wasn’t in a league that had more FBI wiretaps than John Gotti’s favorite Italian restaurant. It’s difficult to recruit against LSU, Auburn and Alabama — three programs targeted in the FBI’s sting operation into college basketball. And let’s not forget Kentucky coach John Calipari, whose two previous college coaching stops — Memphis and UMass — had to vacate their Final Four appearances due to NCAA transgressions.
UF athletic director Scott Stricklin has said that he could always sleep at night knowing that White was running his program the right way. Now Stricklin must conduct another major coaching search only a few months after the bottom fell out of Dan Mullen’s football program and he was replaced by Billy Napier.
If you ask me, finding a viable candidate for UF’s basketball job will be much tougher than filling the football opening. Think about it: Stricklin must go out and find a basketball coach who follows the rules, can win SEC titles and national championships and is willing to take over a program that will always play second-fiddle to football. All the while, this new coach must endure a fan base that only tepidly supports its basketball team but constantly complains about it.
Isn’t it ironic that the Georgia Bulldogs are now responsible for the departure of UF’s last two major head coaches?
Dan Mullen was fired because Florida wants a football coach like Georgia’s.
Mike White bolted because Georgia wants a basketball coach like Florida’s.
That’s what I call getting Dawged.
