Scouting reports aren’t really necessary.
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Florida and SC split the two meetings in the regular season with each team winning at home. They’re all pretty fundamentally sound. They reached that status over a brilliant and blistering second half of basketball in which they buried the Blue Devils with 65 points while making almost three quarters of their shots, showered in the cheers of a home-state Greenville crowd, and converted an 88-81 win into a public appreciation of equal parts novelty and schadenfreude. “We can sit and gripe and mope and complain and blame, they’re not about that”. “I’m sure there’s people don’t like it”.
UF will take on an SEC neighbor with whom the Gators spilt a pair of regular-season games this year, with SC winning 57-53 in Columbia and Florida returning the favor 81-61 in Gainesville. “I felt like we were in their head the whole game”, Thornwell said. “We can’t let them turn us over”. We just got to focus on-oh, we lost.
“They don’t give you any easy looks in the paint”. “Once we got a taste of it we kind of got addicted to it”.
The Gators won the rematch 81-66 with Allen scoring 26 points and they held SC to 39 percent shooting. In the first game, a 57-53 loss at SC on January 18, Allen managed just one point as he was 0-for-3 from the field. He broke out with a career-high 35 points in the regional semifinal. “We just got the stage to do it”. If he has another big game and launches the Gamecocks to their first-eve Elite Eight, he could become an early-20s guy. Florida is back in the Elite Eight for the seventh time since 2006, which ties the Gators with North Carolina for the most in that span. Florida will meet SC on Sunday.
Their paths to this regional final couldn’t have been any more different.
The East Regional Final on Sunday at Madison Square Garden in NY will be an all-SEC battle between the seventh-seeded South Carolina Gamecocks (25-10) and fourth-seeded Florida Gators (27-8), who are listed as small favorites.
“It’s a great win for the program”, Notice said.
Even after SC beat Duke, I, and others, didn’t take them seriously as a threat to make the Elite Eight. The Tigers recently chose to keep coach Brad Brownell in place, and they spent a ton of money on new facilities.
Frank Martin is in his fifth season at the basketball helm, and he has steadily changed the expectation of SC men’s basketball.
I said, you know what, I’m going to motivate them by showing them toughness. “They’re long, they’re athletic”. When they play real competition, it’s going to burn them.’ That’s disrespectful. They protect the rim. “They don’t back down”.
“We have been real good defensively all year, we were on point definitely today”, Gamecocks coach Frank Martin said.
“We all say he’s one of the best in the country, hands down”. Any NBA team would love to pick him up, and he’s still got the potential to grow as a ball player. “Like after shootaround, we’re leaving an arena, we get on Snapchat now and be like: Farewell Tour, we out”.
The Wisconsin-Florida game ended at 12:50 a.m. USC’s next game will be Sunday. Florida is trying to get to the Final Four for the sixth time overall and first since 2014 – and for the first time under coach Mike White. The physicality of the SC defense was the difference. “I’m not making that mistake this time”. Everyone thinks our fans only come out to watch the Gamecocks play football.
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Getting to the Final Four and playing for a title would be huge for the Gamecocks, and all the publicity is invaluable for the program, but they can’t follow that with another 13-year tourney drought.
