Clock strikes midnight for Mike White as Gators fall to Texas A&M

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Florida’s season ended with a thud in the SEC Tournament against Texas A&M.

Yes, I understand that the Gators will probably end up playing in the NIT, but that isn’t the tournament that Gators fans expect. Even the most ardent Mike White supporters have hung on his streak of NCAA Tournament appearances. That’s gone now as well, which means we really do need to analyze what is going wrong and whether White is the right person to fix it.

At this point you can’t accuse me of being an anti-White zealot, hell bent on getting him out of Gainesville. Back in March of 2018 after the season ending loss to Texas Tech, I looked at his statistical profile compared to former head coach Billy Donovan and suggested his path looked promising and that he needed two more years to give us a true idea of his ceiling.

A year later after a tournament loss to Michigan I again suggested he needed more time, looking at the overall youth of the 2019 roster and the incoming recruits (Scottie Lewis, Tre Mann, Omar Payne) as reason to give White another year to figure things out.

I didn’t really dig too deep after COVID canceled the tournament in the ’19-20 season, but my tone changed after the loss to Oral Roberts in the tournament last year. It changed because the promise I had identified early had stagnated into mediocrity, with very little evidence of growth. That has continued through the ’21-22 season and so that conclusion is even stronger.

You can make an argument that since Florida is a “football school,” fans shouldn’t expect the same level of success from its basketball program. I can accept that argument even if I disagree with it (more on that in a minute).

What I can’t accept is the argument that there is any statistical basis that Mike White is in the process of building something substantial in Gainesville. At this point, we should expect that what we see is what we get, and that’s a decidedly average basketball program.

Transfers

Editor’s note: Stats presented below do not include the loss to Texas A&M in the SEC Tournament. 

Some of the arguments that I made in favor of White early on were that he had young teams and needed to be able to get his players into the program. Well, we can’t accuse him of not having had that at this point, and you certainly can’t accuse this team of being young.

Colin Castleton, Tyree Appleby, Phlandrous Fleming, Myreon Jones, Anthony Duruji and Brandon McKissic are all seniors. By minutes played, those are the main six players that Mike White has used this season, with McKissic having the least playing time at 24.1 minutes per game. The next highest on the list is Niels Lane at 14.3 minutes per game.

Every single one of those seniors transferred into Florida at some point, rather than entering through the high school recruiting landscape. Castleton came from Michigan, Appleby from Cleveland State, Fleming from Charleston Southern, Jones from Penn State, Duruji from Louisiana Tech and McKissic from Kansas City.

There hasn’t been a ton of development for those players either.

Colin Castleton has obviously been the outlier here. He increased his output by more than 13 points per game and increased his Win Shares (WS, an estimate of the number of wins contributed by a player due to his offense and defense) by three full games. But every other transfer listed has averaged less points than his previous stop, and perhaps more importantly, except for Phlandrous Fleming has contributed less to winning games than previous stops as well.

The net result is that the total wins contributed from this group sum up to 0.9 games, which is how you end up with a 9-9 regular season record in the SEC.

Recruiting

This would all be acceptable if these transfers were added to a solid base of players that Florida already had who were ready to contribute, but that’s not what happened.

From the 2020-2021 team, Noah Locke (2 WS in 2021) transferred to Louisville and Omar Payne (1.4 WS) transferred to Illinois. Scottie Lewis (1.4 WS) and Tre Mann (3.9 WS) went to the NBA. Castleton (3.2 WS in 2021) and Appleby (2.2 WS in 2021) returned in 2022 and did improve a little bit (a total of 1.6 WS improvement), but that means that the transfers in had to replace the production of the early departures. As noted above, that just didn’t happen.

To further rub salt in the wounds is the transfer out of Andrew Nembhard.

Nembhard was the 23rd ranked recruit overall in the 2018 class, and was a big reason for my optimism back in that 2018 article. He showed significant promise in his first two seasons at Florida, accumulating 3.4 and 3.2 WS in those years.

But then he transferred to Gonzaga, where he has put up 4.0 and 4.7 WS the past two seasons, while helping Gonzaga to the National Championship Game and the top ranking in college basketball this season.

Can you imagine if Nembhard was still on this roster? Another 4-5 wins would put the Gators at a 5 or 6 seed rather than being on the outside looking in right now.

So White didn’t get a whole lot out of his 5-star recruits (Nembhard and Lewis), but he was showing promise recruiting back in 2019 was good, so at least that’s continued, right?

Well…..that’s one of the issues.

A reason you’ll hear for White not being able to build Florida into a consistently successful program is that Billy Donovan did something at Florida that nobody else could do, nor should be expected to do. But is that true?

It is absolutely true that Florida is a football-first school. But prior to Donovan’s arrival, Florida had some success. Lon Kruger had led the Gators to the Final Four in 1993-1994, and had an overall 104-80 (.565) record. Norm Sloan had led Florida to the tournament three times with a 235-194 (.548) record.  White’s record (142-87, .620) is better, but not by all that much.

So what about another football school for comparison? We’d need to pick one where football is definitely first. Where there’s a history of championship-level performance. Where there isn’t much history of basketball success and where we’ve seen a recent uptick in performance on the basketball court.

We have a pretty good program in the SEC that checks all of those boxes the Alabama Crimson Tide.

Prior to Nate Oats arrival, Alabama’s coaches were Avery Johnson (75-62, .547) and Anthony Grant (117-85, .579). That’s remarkably close to Kruger and Sloan. Oats is now at 61-34 (.642) in his first three seasons in Tuscaloosa, but he did win the SEC last season.

Perhaps more importantly, now let’s look at Oats’ and Avery Johnson’s recruiting prowess with the Tide compared to Mike White.

Alabama has the most successful football program in the country, with a fan base and head coach who would divert resources towards that sport in a heartbeat if it were needed. Yet the Tide under two different coaches have now out-recruited Mike White.

The average national ranking of White’s 21 recruits since 2016 is 137.3. Those players have accounted for 44.5 WS in their careers at Florida, meaning that the average White recruit is worth 2.1 WS during his entire tenure at Florida.

Compare that to Alabama, who since 2016 has brought in 23 recruits with an average recruiting ranking of 112.1. Those recruits have produced 61.2 WS, or an average of 2.7 per recruit. And that’s with a coaching change from Johnson to Oats, and the attrition that comes with that sort of change.

What this really means is that using the “football school” reasoning just doesn’t cut it. At this point, Alabama is better at doing the football thing than Florida, and apparently better at doing the basketball thing as well.

Progress?

So maybe we’re seeing progress on the court, so that should sooth us that using the transfer portal instead of just high school recruiting is a superior approach, right?

I had someone on Twitter yell at me recently for not taking all of these categories into account for White and instead just focusing on point differential. Well, I took the advice and would like you tell me where Florida is improving?

White’s best year for turnover margin is 2018, as is his team’s best year for assist to turnover ratio. His best year in offensive rebounding margin is 2016. His best year for free throw differential is 2017. His best year for point differential is 2017. Notice a pattern?

None of those years are recent and there is a lot of red in that chart as you make your way towards recent years.

But even if you pick and choose Florida’s best years in those categories, they come up short compared to an average SEC Champion in two categories (assist:turnover and point differential), just barely exceed the threshold in free throw differential and then comfortably exceed it in TO margin and offensive rebound margin.

That suggests that even picking and choosing the best characteristics of the Mike White era is a borderline SEC Champion.

But perhaps the best way to show this is to just plot White’s era with previous Florida coaches.

The Florida program is a series of peaks and valleys. Norm Sloan had one. So did Kruger. Billy Donovan had three distinct peaks. White has a peak as well, which is better than Kruger’s but lower than Sloan’s. He also now has a prolonged tail that doesn’t suggest a lot of growth for the program.

Takeaway

Mike White has had some tough breaks at Florida.

The most Win Shares from any player he’s recruited is from Keyontae Johnson, and it’s obvious that his unfortunate collapse and subsequent inability to play has impacted things. Andrew Nembhard has turned into a very good college basketball player, but he only spent two of those years at Florida. Scottie Lewis didn’t really pan out, and left for the NBA before he could develop.

But White’s team last year had an NBA first round pick (Tre Mann) along with a strong season from Colin Castleton and still went just 15-10. He then went out and supplemented this year’s team with Fleming, Jones, McKissic and Boston College transfer C.J. Felder.

Interestingly, by Win Shares, Felder is the best of the transfers, coming in at 1.3 WS for this season (0.146 per 40 minutes), yet has only averaged 12.1 minutes per game. Center Jason Jitoboh is actually second on the team in WS/40 (0.206), and though he has missed time with injury, he was only averaging 10.6 minutes per game at the time.

Gator Country’s Eric Fawcett has written repeatedly about White’s lineup usage and it just isn’t optimal. Castleton, Jitoboh and Felder were the three best players by WS/40 this season. They’re three of the top four in Box Plus/Minus (an estimate of the points per 100 possessions a player contributed above a league average team). I don’t have access to individual lineup data, but I bet they were involved in the best units as well.

This season was a high-wire act just to miss the NCAA Tournament. Florida needed the win over A&M – and likely a win over Auburn in the next round – to make it. But they were an extremely high variance team, reliant on three point shooters who weren’t very consistent to get their victories.

In the loss to A&M, Florida shot 20.8 percent from three-point range. That after shooting 26.7 percent in the season finale against Kentucky and 20.8 percent in the inconceivable loss to Texas Southern. Every time they played a ranked team, they struggled from behind the arc. The only exception was the one-point victory over Auburn that looked like it would save the season.

But that’s really the point. When you rely on three point shooting to win and you don’t have elite shooters on your squad, you’re not going to win consistently.

But to call Mike White inconsistent isn’t really true. As the point differential chart shows, he’s been really consistent. He just hasn’t been all that good.

Average is good enough for some programs. Maybe it’s good enough for Florida when it comes to basketball. I’d probably support eliminating the basketball program if it brought more success on the football field (kinda joking, but….).

But the excuse that you can’t win an SEC Championship because you’re a football school doesn’t cut it anymore. Alabama just won the SEC Championship in both just last year.

The excuse that the team wasn’t experienced enough doesn’t cut it anymore. Florida’s 2021-2022 squad was loaded with seniors.

The excuse that White needs to get his own players in doesn’t cut it anymore. He has had plenty of time to recruit either via high school or the transfer portal at this point, and his recruiting rankings are going down rather than improving.

There was always hope among some that just getting into the tournament meant that Florida had a chance, and that White would be able to get a deep run to jumpstart some momentum with the program. I’m not sure I’d call a program like Florida a Cinderella story, but getting to the tournament was the rallying cry even if you suspected it wasn’t going to be a very long ride before the Gators turned into a pumpkin.

But the loss to A&M means two things. Florida won’t be going to the dance. And for Mike White, the clock just struck midnight.