Notable
* Florida rallied from 18 points down to tie the game at 54-54 with 9:07 to play, but Auburn pulled away to hand the Gators their first home loss of the season (9-1).
* Thomas Haugh matched his career high with 27 points to go along with 10 rebounds. It marked Haugh’s eighth 20-point game and fourth double-double of the season.
* Florida falls to 38-3 at home since the start of the 2023-24 season.
* Urban Klavžar added 12 points off the bench, including a pair of 3-pointers. It marked Klavžar’s 10th double-figure scoring game this season and his 10th straight game with a made 3.
* Haugh also extended his 3-pointer streak to 15 straight games.
* Rueben Chinyelu scored 10 points and grabbed seven rebounds, seeing his double-double streak end at four games, longest by a Gator since 2005 (David Lee).
* Florida saw its 16-game home win streak come to an end, losing on its home court for the first time since Jan. 14, 2025, vs. Missouri. The streak tied for the eighth-longest home winning streak in program history, and 10 straight home SEC wins tied for the seventh-longest such streak.
Head Coach Todd Golden
Opening Statement…
“Disappointed, anytime you lose you’re disappointed, but we’d been playing pretty well and I don’t think that we played great today. First, I want to credit Auburn. I thought they took the fight to us today, and that’s something that we take a lot of pride in doing. We’ve been pretty consistent with that over the last couple of weeks, throwing the first punch and the majority of punches. I thought the first half, they just were better than us in that way. Quicker to balls, more physical, did a great job on the glass. We were down six on the glass at halftime. Obviously, Keyshawn Hall had an incredible performance in the first half. Sometimes you’ve got to tip your cap that way. We didn’t do a good enough job, guarding threes, or keeping them off the line. But it’s a long season, and it starts with me. Anytime you get to a point where you think you got things rolling a little bit, and the moment you feel like they’re on the right track, you get punch in the mouth, and that’s what happened to us today. Again, credit to Auburn. We’ve got some things we’ve got to clean up before we get on the road to South Carolina next week.”
On if media recognition impacted the team’s complacency…
“I think it was a little human nature in the sense that, I thought we had great prep after the LSU game. We were pretty consistent in the way we go about the things we had to do in our program, thought we had a good practice yesterday, thought we were locked in this morning. So maybe that showed up when we started the game, just, we’re out here, we’ve got a great crowd, and things are just going to go our way. And they certainly didn’t in the first half. It was similar to Missouri last year at home, there’s a lot of really good teams in our league. Auburn’s one of them. They’ve got really good talent. We pride ourselves on being the mentally and physically tougher team. I don’t think we were either of those tonight. We did not respond quickly enough to their early punches and we just couldn’t get back on track in the first half.”
On Auburn being able to limit Alex Condon…
“They had a different game plan than most teams. They just weren’t guarding him on the perimeter, plugging up the paint. Obviously, he’s not shooting the ball great right now, and we weren’t able to take advantage of that. I was more disappointed with our inability to get him down low, but they were showing bodies anytime we threw in inside. Again, where his game disappointed me was the four turnovers. You’re not going to score every night, not going to be great that way, but you can’t turn the ball over four times when you’re a guy that we run a majority of our offense through, and he just got outplayed tonight.”
Junior C Rueben Chinyelu
On what the message was at halftime…
“Just going out there and playing because we went out there and we weren’t our best and we weren’t playing basketball, so the message was just go out there and play. Play hard, nothing is given, you’re just going to have to go get it and we didn’t do that in the first half. That’s not us and that shouldn’t be us, so just go out there and play and I think we did much better in the second half than the first half.”
On the misses at the free throw line…
“I think it’s just unacceptable, just to be missing free throws. It’s called free for a reason, so just knowing that we need to make more free throws because the past few games we have had bad free throw shooting and that shouldn’t be happening now. We’re going to work on that and make sure that we are much better than this game.”
Junior F Thomas Haugh
On the tough start and early deficit…
“I think it’s my fault. I let Keyshawn (Hall), who’s a really talented scorer, let him get going. Once he gets hot it’s hard to stop. I was working out with him a lot in LA this year, so I knew he was a really good scorer. I can’t, first thing, let him go out there and get some of those shots and get into rhythm, and then eventually we weren’t physical enough. We were getting outrebounded in the first half by seven, that can’t happen.”
On if this game can be seen as a wake-up call…
“Definitely. I think we were getting a little ahead of ourselves here seeing media start respect us as a team again. Everybody started saying, “The Gators are back, Gators are back.’ This is gonna definitely motivate us going forward. We got pounced here at home and that just can’t happen going forward.”
