There are two Waterford Crystal basketballs, flanked by the 2006 and 2007 NCAA championship trophies, on display at the entrance of Florida’s basketball practice facility. They are conspicuous daily reminders of what the program used to be and what it aspires to be again. Todd Golden, the 38-year-old coach in his second season guiding the Gators, doesn’t hide from that history. He isn’t intimidated by the massive shadow cast over Billy Donovan Court by its namesake.
“The reason I was so excited about this opportunity is when I was playing in college, Florida was winning those back-to-back championships,” Golden says, “and that tradition is something that really resonated with me. It was always a brand that I had a lot of respect for, so when the opportunity to lead this program presented itself, it was a no-brainer for me. Then getting here and understanding the landscape and where the program was, I thought it was really important for us to tie together the success that Billy had, the way his teams were built and the way they played, with what we want to do.”
So one of his first phone calls was to Donovan, who recommended his next call be to Taurean Green, the starting point guard for both of Florida’s national championship teams. After a 14-year professional playing career, Green had gone to work on Donovan’s Chicago Bulls staff. “Billy D talked about how important he was to their team and how good a leader he was,” Golden says. So he hired Green as Florida’s director of player development in 2022.
“If you talk to people about Todd, you’re going to hear a lot of them say, ‘He’s really smart.’ Because he’s really smart, and he really put an emphasis on bringing back somebody from the past,” Green says. “He knows it’s important for the guys to see someone who loves this university and was part of making it great and knows what it takes. … They hear me talk a lot about the winning mentality that gets us back to being Florida basketball.”
What he means by that, what the Gators are trying to recapture, is a rather lofty aspiration. In one 10-season span from 2004-05 to 2013-14, Donovan averaged 28 wins. He won 71.5 percent of his games over 19 years, made 14 NCAA Tournaments, seven Elite Eights, four Final Fours and those two titles.
“That’s a huge part of coming to Florida,” point guard Zyon Pullin says. “Seeing that history, knowing it can be done here, having guys like Taurean on the staff and knowing he’s been there and done that. Everyone is really bought into getting Florida back to what it should be.”
After a bumpy first season under Golden, the Gators are closer to that dream that they’ve been in some time. Their 24 wins are the most since Florida reached the Elite Eight in 2017. Their SEC tournament championship game appearance last week was the program’s first in a decade. And now they’re back in the NCAA Tournament, opening play Friday as a No. 7 seed against 10th-seeded Colorado, feeling quite good about their chances to make a run.
From Jan. 20 until the SEC title game, where they ran out of gas in the second half against a buzzsaw Auburn squad, they went 13-4, beat six NCAA Tournament teams, rolled those same Tigers at home, swept Alabama and won at Kentucky. Every game they lost in that stretch was a nail-biter.
“When we won at Rupp (Arena, that was kind of the moment),” Golden says. “”We’d been playing well but hadn’t had that huge win yet to get us over the hump. Finding a way to win that game at Rupp, you could almost immediately feel the belief within our guys that, ‘Hey, we could beat anybody on a given night.’ And we’ve kind of taken off since then.’ ”
The Gators trailed by 10 in that Jan. 31 game at Kentucky and came back to win in overtime. They trailed Texas A&M by 18 in the SEC semifinals and roared back to win. They’ve come back from double-digit deficits to win eight times in the last two seasons under Golden, which his players believe is no accident. Green is right about what you’ll hear when you start asking around about Golden.
“Super, super, super smart,” Pullin says. “That’s the whole staff. When you look at our after-timeout plays, how we switch things up in the second half to get us going on runs, these guys are just so smart. The game is all about adjustments, and this staff does a great job of that. There’s a lot of confidence in the way we play, because everybody feels really prepared.”
That’s how a baby-faced guy with only three years of head-coaching experience got a job this big in the first place. Because he could explain to Florida athletic director Scott Stricklin exactly how he coached San Francisco to 22 wins in Year 1 and 24 wins in Year 3 and got the Dons to their first NCAA Tournament in almost a quarter century. And he could explain exactly how he was going to get the Gators back on top just as quickly.
“He articulates a plan really well,” Stricklin says. “It wasn’t just the way he wanted to play, but I remember him talking about the pieces needed to play that way. He explained how when COVID hit and he had to rebuild at San Francisco, he did it with length and guards who can get to the rim. It’s a style very similar to what Nate Oats is doing at Alabama — NBA-style, attack the rim and shoot 3s — but Todd really laid out how you construct a roster, and that stood out.”
This year’s team is proof of concept. In Pullin (UC Riverside), Walter Clayton Jr. (Iona), Tyrese Samuel (Seton Hall), Will Richard (Belmont) and Micah Handlogten (Marshall), Golden found five transfer-portal pieces that fit perfectly together. Those five combined to average 63.3 points and 26 rebounds. Throw in sophomore Riley Kugel, Golden’s first big recruiting win, and freshmen Alex Condon and Thomas Haugh, a pair of three-star prospects the staff believed were much better than that (and have been), and it all looks like a thoughtful plan coming together.
Florida has a top-15 offense, a top-20 tempo and a top-10 offensive rebounding team nationally. Golden went out and got size and shooting. After not having any depth behind star big man Colin Castelton last season — who missed the final seven games with injury — Golden was determined to “get long and stay long,” Stricklin says. So there are five guys 6-9 or taller on this team (and a 7-foot-6 Guinness World Record holder for tallest teenager arriving this summer). Six guys have made double-digit 3s and four have made 30-plus from deep. The Gators aren’t great defensively, but they play just enough of it that their 85.1 points per game – sixth-most in Division I – usually do the trick.
“There’s a little bit of luck involved, but we were really selective in the guys we went after,” Golden says. “We really wanted to play this way, and I think we executed it about as well as we could.”
A Jan. 31 win at Kentucky was a turning point for the Gators. (Jordan Prather / USA Today)
But play style and roster building aren’t all that sold Stricklin on him. Golden also oozes charisma. And, frankly, his age was a big selling point. Donovan was 30 when he took the Florida job. Golden was 36.
“The idea you could hire someone who is going to have a long runway,” Stricklin says, “and have a chance to do something special here for a long time, combined with all the other things that are so impressive about Todd, made him really attractive.”
None of Golden’s mentors along the way are surprised at all by what he’s doing — or how fast he’s doing it.
Randy Bennett inherited a Saint Mary’s program that went 2-27 the year before he arrived. In Year 4, he won 25 games and went to the NCAA Tournament. Golden was a freshman point guard on that team. Three years later, Golden was a senior captain on another NCAA Tournament team that launched a streak of six straight 25-win seasons for the Gaels. He made all six of his 3-point attempts in a huge win over Gonzaga that year.
“I remember the local paper had a big headline: GOLDEN IS GOLDEN,” Bennett says. “I don’t want to say he overachieved, but he came in as a walk-on and worked his way up from that to captain, because he just had a toughness and a competitiveness and an intelligence about him and he took a lot of pride in how he carried himself and how he led the team. Things you’d want in a coach, he just checked every box. He was always a leader. Even when he was young, he was right in the mix, chopping it up with the older guys, and they accepted that because he just wanted to win badly and was always talking and acting like that.”
Kyle Smith was an assistant on that Saint Mary’s team. He’d eventually give Golden his first job at Columbia, then hire him again at San Francisco. Golden took over for Smith there when he left to coach Washington State.
Smith knew Golden was special from “when he was running around with a headband and bleach-blonde hair. AAU basketball, I knew he was different. I didn’t know if he was good different or bad different.”
Turns out, it was the good kind. Last season, the exceedingly positive Golden karate-chopped a whiteboard in half during a timeout just to get his team’s attention. His hand bled, but his team won. Everyone laughs about how absurd and ingenious it was now.
“He’s gifted,” Smith says. “He always knew he had it, the charisma and intelligence and likability factor. He has a really high likability factor. We had some turnover on our staff (at Saint Mary’s) when he finished playing for like three months. He was in the office and he ran our camps. And you kind of knew, ‘Oh, this guy’s got a chance.’”
But first, Golden wanted to see how long he could play — which he did for a couple of years in Israel — and then he wasn’t totally sure coaching was his path, so he started out working in advertising sales.
“I don’t think he needs to coach to be happy,” Smith says. “He’s talented. He could do other things. He enjoys it. He loves it. But he doesn’t need to do it like some of these other guys. He’s just good at it.”
“He could’ve gone into business and been great,” Bennett says, “but he’s an incredible coach.”
In between Columbia and San Francisco, Golden was an assistant from 2014-16 at Auburn under Bruce Pearl, who coached him a few years earlier in the Maccabiah Games in Israel. Like everyone, Pearl was immediately taken with his analytical mind and magnetic personality. It was fitting that Golden’s first SEC championship game pitted him against Pearl and the Tigers.
“There are certain topics that I get emotional about,” Pearl says. “When you mention Todd Golden, it almost immediately begins to trigger like if you ask me about my son, Steven. It’s emotional. I love Todd. I love him like a son. I am so proud of him for the coach that he has become, the father that he is, the man that he is. Florida made a great hire. That’s a place that expects to win championships.”
These Gators might not be quite ready to deliver one of those, especially after starting center Handlogten suffered a season-ending leg injury in the SEC championship game, but they’re already good enough to dream that big.
“We have those trophies right there when you walk in,” Golden says, “and this is the type of place that there’s pressure to get another one of those. But the pressure is a privilege. We feel like we have the ability and the means to be as successful as we want to be.”
Green knows what an elite culture looks like, and he’s seeing some familiar signs again at his alma mater.
“We were tough, we were connected, we were together on those championship teams,” he says. “A lot of the characteristics that our team has this year. It’s awesome, man. We’re right back where we need to be.”
For info on tickets, click here.
(Top photo: Andy Lyons / Getty Images)
