Georgia AD Josh Brooks pays Mike White the ultimate compliment

Georgia secured a massive upset of No. 3 Florida on Tuesday night, perhaps the defining game in its soon-to-be NCAA Tournament resume. For coach Mike White, it was a long time coming.

White had yet to beat his former team, the Gators, in a handful of meetings since taking over as the head coach of the Bulldogs.

“I’m so happy for Mike,” Georgia athletics director Josh Brooks said on the Paul Finebaum Show on Thursday. “I know that it’s never about him, he doesn’t make it about himself, but for us I know it was a special night for him.”

While Georgia still has work to do to make the NCAA Tournament field — most bracketologists have the Bulldogs as one of the first four out or last four in — the progress White has made has been remarkable. Brooks outlined, from an analytics standpoint, just how far the program has come.

“You really think about it, you look at where we were as a program when we hired him just under three years ago,” Brooks said. “We were about 220 in NET at that point in time. His first year he gets us to about 150, his second year he gets us, we’re in the 70s, 80s. I think we finished somewhere in the 80s. This year we’re hanging in like we’re around 35, 36 in the NET.”

A remarkable turnaround for White and company.

But perhaps the bigger tell is that Georgia basketball fans are … getting upset? That’s right, Brooks pointed to the fans’ passion following a recent four-game losing skid as a key barometer of program success.

“If you think about that in perspective, what he inherited, where he’s got us to, it’s really remarkable,” Brooks said. “And look, with that, when you have a skid of a couple games the pressure heats up and people, whether it’s my Twitter account or e-mails, people get upset. But that’s almost a compliment to him, that he’s made Georgia basketball so relevant that people are, the passion’s there.

“I never want to be apologetic to our fans’ passions, because I’d much rather them be expecting to win and being upset when we lose than being apathetic. That’s the highest compliment I can give him, is that he’s brought Georgia basketball to a place where people are expecting to win each and every night.”

Mike White has the Georgia fans believing again.