Florida's coach debunks locker room drama, revealing early season struggles stemmed from confidence, not conflict, paving the way for their dominant run.
Florida earned a No. 1 seed for the NCAA Tournament after finishing 26-7 and 16-2 in SEC play this season.
That record looks good now, but the Gators appeared to be in serious trouble early in the season.
On Dec. 9, UF lost 77-73 to UConn, dropping Florida to just 5-4 on the season. The Gators had losses to Duke, TCU, and Arizona. They had only beaten Florida State by two points.
During an episode of the "Triple Option Podcast" this week, Urban Meyer wanted to know if head coach Todd Golden saw an attitude issue in the locker room amid the 5-4 start.
Golden didn't think his team had an attitude issue as much as the team needed to gain confidence.
“You know what we didn't have any attitude issues," Golden said. "I do think early on in the year we had a little bit of some confidence issues and I think that stemmed from us not knowing each other very well yet...
“Obviously we brought in Boogie (Fland) from Arkansas and Xavian (Lee) from Princeton. And then our front court went from being kind of role-playing butt kickers to now being the main guys... it took a little bit for us to find our footing that way."
The Gators went on an impressive streak following their opening SEC loss to Mizzou. The groundwork for the run started after the loss to UConn, when Golden had a conversation with his players in the locker room.
"I told our guys, I said, 'Listen, man, we're right there. But we need to get a lot better also. Like we're not close to a finished product. We need certain guys to pick up their play. We need certain guys to be better leaders.'
"And we have great guys. We had no infighting. We had no complaining. But we had to get our confidence level where it needed to be. And I didn't want our guys to be arrogant, but we had to be more confident than what we were playing with."
Golden believes his team has found the winning formula for the NCAA Tournament.
Florida is set to play the winner of Wednesday's game between No. 16 seeds Prairie View A&M and Lehigh Mountain in the first round.
The Gators appear ready to defend their national title over the next month. With the No. 1 seed, UF should be more than competent with its team.