Notable
* Florida topped #20 Missouri to earn its first AP Top 25 win under Todd Golden. It also marks a three-game win streak for the Gators on the heels of victories vs. Georgia (home) and LSU (away). UF’s opponents during the three-game run entered with a combined 36-9 record (.800).
* The Gators clawed back from an early 11-0 hole just over four minutes into the game. UF outscored Mizzou by 20 over the remainder of the game, tying the game at 28 at halftime and taking command with a 7-2 spurt to go up 57-50 with 6:10 remaining. The Tigers never got it back to a one-possession game from that point.
* Will Richard matched a season-high with 18 points to lead UF in scoring, shooting 4-for-8 from 3-point range and hitting all six free throw attempts.
* Colin Castleton eclipsed the 1,000-point mark as a Gator, becoming the 55th all-time member of UF’s 1,000-point club but just the second transfer to do so alongside Dorian Finney-Smith (1,220 points; 2013-16).
* Castleton also notched his third double-double of the season with 16 points and 13 rebounds, the 16th double-double of his career. He ranks 5th in double-doubles at Florida since the 1996-97 season.
* Castleton added a career-high six assists and has multiple dimes in five straight games.
* He also became the first SEC player this century to post 16 points, 13 rebounds, six assists and two blocked shots in a conference game (Derek Hood, Arkansas, 2/24/1999 vs. Auburn).
* Myreon Jones continued his steady play with five assists and one turnover in 34:37 of court time. Over the Gators’ three-game win streak, Jones has 10 assists and two turnovers
* Riley Kugel hit a big pair of 3-pointers early to keep the Gators within striking distance. He matched his career high with 13, going 4-for-6 from the field and 3-for-4 from 3-point range.
* Florida held Missouri 21.7 points below the Tigers’ scoring average. Mizzou entered the game shooting .356 from 3 with 9.6 made, and UF limited Mizzou to 3-for-18 (.167) beyond the arc.
Head Coach Todd Golden
On the win…
“Awesome win for us. We’re really consistent at being bad for the first four to six minutes of the game, consistently terrible. But we played great the last 34 minutes. We need to stop digging ourselves holes. Obviously if I had a great answer for it, we wouldn’t do it. With that being said, that’s a really good team, a really good offensive team. Obviously they provide a lot of defensive pressure which really bothered us in the first half. Credit to our guys. I thought in the second half we did a great job of handling that pressure, only five turnovers. We shot over 50 from the field, 45% from three, and made six threes in the second half. Just a great effort. As we talked about, there’s been some games early on where we lost where a lot of things looked good but we just didn’t make shots. Tonight our guys stepped up and made shots. They made big time plays in big moments. That’s a sign of a team really coming of age. Proud of our group. Three in a row, hard to do in this league and got a big challenge coming up on Wednesday.”
On Myreon Jones and Kyle Lofton…
“Myreon [Jones] has really been playing well over the past, really since Christmas. He just doesn’t turn over the ball. He’s really solid with it, five assists, one turnover tonight. Felt like having those veteran guys out there would help calm us down. Those two along with Colin [Castleton] did a really good job handling their pressure, but a lot of other guys stepped up and made big shots. Riley [Kugel] in the first half kept us in it. Will [Richard] hit four threes, some were huge to answer some of their runs. We felt like if we could take care of the ball against them that we would find a way to make shots and we did in the second half.
On his halftime speech…
“It was kind of explaining to the guys that we can look at this one of two ways. We can either hang our heads and feel sorry for ourselves that we’re getting the ball taken from us and we have 14 turnovers or we can say hey, we have 14 turnovers but this game is still tied. The fact that it’s tied leads me to believe that if we take care of the ball in the second half, we’re going to have a great chance to win. We thought if we took care of it in the second half we would win by 10. That’s what we told the guys at halftime. Five turnovers and we won by nine, pretty close to what we were hoping. It was a challenge moment: tie game at home, a top 20 team on your floor. It’s an opportunity you don’t want to let pass up and I’m really proud of our guys for grabbing it today.”
Grad F Colin Castleton
On the 3-game win streak…
“It’s big, being able to trust it. We were at .500. We all just came together and said we got to figure this out, whatever we have to do to get it done to win games is the biggest thing. We had a couple close ones, and we can’t get those back, we can only get what’s ahead of us and that was our goal. That was our focus, and we won a couple good ones, we gotta take this day off tomorrow, rest up, get our bodies right, and just keep winning, that’s the goal.”
On scoring 1,000 points…
“It feels good, you know I’ve been in college for a long time. I feel like a grandpa sometimes. It feels good to be able to do that, it doesn’t really matter to me personally, just being able to win the game is the biggest thing, because we wouldn’t have won I probably wouldn’t have cared at all. The biggest thing for me was winning this game tonight.”
Sophomore G Will Richard
On responding to the early deficit…
“Just slowing the game down for ourselves. I feel like those first few minutes we were rushing, letting them speed up the game, get in transition. So just slowing down, falling back to our scout, and just executing.”
On feeling good about the game…
“When Riley came off the bench and gave us those good points. I think he hit two 3’s early on so, that really gave us a spark, and everybody else really fed off that.”
Grad G Myreon Jones
On halftime adjustments….
“At halftime we talked about how we would get rebounds, but they would come back, or we would get steals, and they come back and took it. We talked about securing it before we go down the court and that if we take care of the ball, we can get whatever we want. At halftime, we were saying we had like 15, 13 turnovers, but we were tied, so we just took care of it and we beat them.”
On confidence…
“I’ve always had my confidence, I just do what I know I can do, try to help us win, any way I have to. It (this game) didn’t do anything for my confidence, my confidence already been there.”
