When the brackets were released on Sunday, Florida basketball received their third-ever No. 1 seed.
If history is any indication, Gator fans should start looking into hotel rooms in San Antonio. The other two times the Gators received a top seed; they advanced to the Final Four.
Florida will rely heavily on Walter Clayton, Jr, the senior guard out of Lake Wales, FL, to help them advance past the first round for the first time since 2021.
“A lot of people questioned his ability to play point guard at the SEC level, and he, in my humble opinion, is playing like the best guard in America right now,” said coach Todd Golden. “He’s as big a part of our success as anybody.”
Clayton averaged just over 20 points during Florida’s SEC Tournament run, increasing a run of 18 games scoring in double-figures. The team went 15-3 during that stretch.
While it seems that Florida has a target on their back, they are just taking it one game at a time.
“We haven’t been looking past anything,” Clayton said to reporters Thursday. “It just means a lot to finally get here, get an opportunity to come out and win some games in a row.”
With the SEC sending a record 14 teams to the tournament, it looks like a lot of the physical play will prepare them for a wide variety of situations during March.
“It’s something that we’ve talked about as a staff a lot, something that we’ve kind of addressed with our players,” said Golden. “There might be some things in SEC play that you can get away with that might get whistled early on in the tournament before you start getting into more of those kind of bigger, physical matchups.”
If Norfolk State is going to shock the world with just the third No. 16 over No. 1 upset, they will have to handle the No. 1 offense in the nation according to KenPom. A fact not lost on this Gator squad.
“The fact that we’ve got multiple guys that can do multiple things,” Clayton said. “Multiple guys that can be on ball, off ball. So I think it’s just a healthy balance of guys, depending on the game, whatever the game is, guys provide different things. That’s what makes it so great.”
The Spartans have definitely paid attention to how much Clayton has been disrupting teams all season long.
“Over the last five games, he’s been averaging even more than he’s been averaging the whole season, said Norfolk State coach Robert Jones. “He’s been averaging 21 points a game, shooting 42 percent from 3. I’m not going to use the word stop because a kid like that is going to get enough touches, is going to get enough opportunities to score the ball, that we just have to slow him down. We just can’t allow him to have a big, big game.”
This is just the second meeting between these two programs, with Florida ending the Spartans magical run in the 2012 NCAA Tournament. The Gators are 4-0 all time against current members of the Mid-Eastern Athletic Conference (MEAC).