Georgia Bulldogs

No. 17 Florida keeping tabs on upstart Georgia (Feb 07, 2017)

Published Feb. 6, 2017 11:19 p.m. ET

Remember how the Southeastern Conference basketball race was supposed to be Kentucky and the other 14 schools, flailing away to no avail as they tried to match the Wildcats?

With a month left in the regular season, that storyline has been wadded up and thrown away like an 8x11 sheet of paper. That sort of describes how No. 17 Florida treated Kentucky Saturday night in an 88-66 rout that propelled the Gators into a second-place tie with the Wildcats, a game behind South Carolina.

It was the capper to a four-game stretch surpassed by no one in the nation, not even top-ranked Gonzaga. Florida has outscored its outmatched opposition by a combined 128 points, making serious commitments to defense and rebounding.

Now comes the potentially tricky part, as the Gators (18-5, 8-2) visit Georgia for the quintessential trap game on Tuesday at Stegeman Coliseum in Athens, Ga.

That would be the same Bulldog team that took Florida to overtime on Jan. 14 before the Gators escaped with an 80-76 win. The same Georgia team that has lost four SEC games in a row and would love nothing more than an upset of one of its biggest rivals.

In short, this figures to be a hungry group of Bulldogs, and it would behoove Florida to use the same formula that's propelled it into SEC regular season title contention.

"We've been a different team defensively these last four games, though it helps that shots are going in at the rate they're going in," Gators coach Mike White said. "But they made a commitment to going back and defending like they're capable of."

Since a puzzling home loss to Vanderbilt Jan. 21, after which Florida players and coaches convened a stern team meeting, it's held opponents to 34.7 percent field goal shooting and outrebounded them by a mind-boggling average of 17 per game.

In the win over Kentucky, which fielded its usual cast of five-star recruits, the Gators grabbed 54 rebounds to the Wildcats' 29. The final margin represented Florida's biggest win in the series' 90-year history and Kentucky's worst loss as a top 10 team in 25 years.

"I told our guys, 'Hey, beating Kentucky is great. They're one of the best teams in the country, but we are too,'" White said. "We were locked in."

Georgia (13-10, 4-6) nearly did what Florida did to Kentucky, leading late in regulation before the Wildcats forced overtime and won 90-81 on Jan. 31. The Bulldogs then ate a 77-75 defeat Saturday at South Carolina in a game featuring no less than 18 lead changes.

Forward/center Yante Maten is averaging 19.7 points and 7.4 rebounds for Georgia, and should earn Player of the Year consideration in the SEC despite his team's mediocre record.

How good has Maten been? He's on the watch lists for the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award, given to the nation's top center, and the Karl Malone Award that goes to the top power forward.

"I consider myself a basketball player," he said on a recent teleconference. "Wherever they want to try to put my game in, that's really up to them. But I just play basketball how I play basketball."