Donovan ‘not surprised’ Gators lousy against Bama

ATLANTA — Billy Donovan signaled for a timeout. His Florida Gators’ SEC tournament game against Alabama was all of 65 seconds old. Bama’s lead was a gargantuan 4-zip.

But Donovan wasn’t taking any chances. Sixty-five seconds. Timeout. You think an opening-round conference tournament game in March isn’t a tad bit different than a regular-season contest in January?

Never mind that it didn’t work. The Crimson Tide extended that four-point cushion to a 42-14 advantage later in the opening period. Bama ultimately hung on for an 80-69 win, which means you can pretty much strike the phrase “two-time defending national champions” from any sentence including the Gators.

This is what makes conference tournament time both crazy and cruel. One moment you’re riding an 18-game postseason winning streak, having not lost a single tournament game — either conference or NCAA contest — since March 20, 2005, against Villanova in the second round of March Madness.

Then later you’ve got your coach looking at his freshman-dominated team and saying, as a dejected Donovan did, “I’m not really excited about these guys becoming sophomores.”

And, “I’m not surprised. A lot of these guys talk a good game, they really do. But we’re 31 games into the season and we’re making the same mistakes we’ve made all season.”

And, just in case it wasn’t crystal clear how upset Billy D was: “For (freshman forward) Chandler (Parsons) to say we weren’t ready to play. How can you not be ready to play your first ever SEC tournament game?”

A lot of basketball coaches and fans beyond the SEC have wondered that same thing about their teams this week.

Syracuse fans, for instance, whose Orange collapsed in the opening round of the Big East tourney against Villanova when the ’Cuse desperately needed a victory to reach March Madness. And Gonzaga, which lost in the West Coast Conference tourney final to San Diego. Louisville, with Final Four aspirations, fell to Pittsburgh in the Big East tournament for the third straight spring Thursday night.

What made this more surprising was that Florida had already won at Alabama earlier this season and was probably playing for a spot in the NCAA tournament. A win might not necessarily have got the Gators in, but a loss would definitely leave them out, which meant they would be the first NCAA champion not to return to the event since Kansas failed to get back in 1989 — and the first two-time champ not to get back since UCLA missed the 1966 tourney.

“I watch it every day, so I’m not surprised at all,” Donovan said. “There was nothing that was uncharacteristic for me as a coach watching our team play today.”

Of course, for Florida to flop, the Tide had to roll. Thus did the 4-0 cushion become 14-0, then 26-5, then 42-14 with 4:07 in the first half.

“Well, there wasn’t any magic dust we put on them,” said Bama boss Mark Gottfried, whose team faces SEC West winner Mississippi State tonight. “If there was, we would have used it before now. But I thought that the last couple of days our guys did a really good job of understanding what Florida was going to run.”

Added Gottfrield, grinning ear to ear: “I told my team I just bought a bunch of underwear and I don’t want to go home yet.”

Mostly, they didn’t go home because Tide senior Mykal Riley — who scored 13 points in the overtime win over Vanderbilt on Saturday — understood that hitting a tournament-tying record eight 3-pointers would greatly help Bama improve to 17-15 on the year.

“It was real big to shoot those 3s and make them,” Riley said.

It was probably a real big surprise throughout the rest of college basketball to see the two-time defending national champs fall 28 points behind a team that’s likely headed to the NIT.

“That’s shocking,” Parsons said. “With everything that we were playing for, for us to allow ourselves to get that far behind.”

Whether Gottfrield admits it or not, there had to be some magic dust out there somewhere.