Todd Golden: ‘Hell yeah’ Auburn is a national championship contender

A surging Florida basketball team rebounded from its first loss in five games by winning its fifth of the last six, this time putting on their best performance of the year against Auburn.

The Gators never trailed vs. the Tigers, nor was the game ever even tied after 0-0 as Todd Golden’s group continued its stellar play offensively while putting a muzzle on Auburn’s potent offense, which had just scored 99 points vs. Alabama in the middle of the week. Afterwards, though, Golden was very complimentary of the Tigers, who he believes are still primed for a potential Final Four run.

“If you were to ask me, you know, is Auburn in the mix of teams that could win a national championship, I’d say ‘hell yeah,'” Golden said during the opening statement of his postgame presser after the big win. He went to explain:

“They’re playing as well as anybody — top-10 offense, top-3 defense, a lot of continuity on the roster, a lot of really, really good players. You know, and then we come out and we play our best game of the year against them. And obviously, it’s in the same bucket as the Kentucky win. You know, it’s a great, great program-lifting win.”

Florida has performed well for most of the season, avoiding losing games they shouldn’t while putting together a pretty good record. But prior to the last couple weeks, they just didn’t have those resume wins. Well, after going into Rupp Arena and beating Kentucky last week, then blowing the doors off of a ranked Auburn team at home, the lack of quality victories is an issue no more.

In those wins and during this stretch winning five of six, Todd Golden really credits his team’s improved play out of the games in the second half.

“But where I’m really proud of our team and our program is, as you all know, we’ve been playing really well. You know, we had won four out of the last five going into this game, but we were having trouble maintaining leads in the second half. We were having trouble keeping our foot on the pedal.”

Not against Auburn, though, as Florida led by 16 at the break and ballooned that advantage up to 27 at one point before the Tigers ultimately trimmed the final tally back down to 16. Golden was happy to see his team put their foot on the Tigers’ throats in the first couple segments of that second half.

“At halftime, the message was simple to the guys, I say ‘hey, it’s time for us to grow up a little bit, we got a 16-point lead against a great team, but we’re not just going to try to get this thing to the finish line, we got to come out and be aggressive.’ I think we scored 20 points in the first six or seven minutes of the second half to really set the tone that way.”

If not for that strong start out of the gate in half No. 2, Auburn’s late run and Florida’s long scoring drought in the final minutes could have made it a much closer ball game.