Minutes after the Gators basketball team lost to Texas Tech in the second round of the NCAA Tournament, Twitter was awash with calls for head coach Mike White’s firing, so much so that Scott Stricklin felt he needed to issue a vote of confidence immediately after the game.
.@MikeWhiteUF IS my guy. Don’t @ me. https://t.co/7Zcu4XqHYH
— Scott Stricklin (@ScottStricklin) March 18, 2018
This isn’t anything new for anybody using that particular app this season. The Gators have been maddeningly inconsistent, especially considering the way they looked early in the season.
The win against Gonzaga and the late loss against Duke early in the year made it seem like this Gators team was ready to compete for a championship. The thought was that any inconsistencies would resolve themselves with center John Egbunu returning from a knee injury.
But Egbunu was never able to come back from that injury and the inconsistencies persisted. Even worse, Egbunu’s absence was perceived by some as an excuse similar to those used by Jim McElwain’s defenders who wanted to give him another year of offensive futility.
I understand that sentiment.
But by the end of his third year, there were clear statistical reasons to part way with McElwain. Add to that the way he alienated many within the athletic department and then the ridiculous death threat fiasco and most reasonable people had to admit the time had come for him to leave.
But what does the statistical record say about Mike White?
The Billy Donovan Standard
Billy Donovan was a great coach, and certainly the first thing that comes to mind is that the standard he set is championships.
He won the SEC regular season six times. He won the SEC tournament four times. And of course, he won the national championship twice.
But Donovan was not Mike Krzyzewski. Coach K has a .787 winning percentage at Duke along with his five championships. Donovan was not John Calipari either, at least not Calipari at Kentucky. Calipari has compiled a .811 winning percentage with the Wildcats. He wasn’t even his mentor Rick Pitino, who compiled a .767 winning percentage at Kentucky and Louisville.
Instead, the coach I would use as a comparison to Donovan is Syracuse’s Jim Boeheim. Boeheim is 925-367 at Syracuse, for a .716 winning percentage. Donovan was 467-186 (.715) in his time at Florida. Boeheim only has one championship, but could easily have another instead of two runner-up finishes.
For a 35 game season, that .715 winning percentage equates to 25 wins. That also means that his teams lost 10 games on average. 25-10 is a very, very good record. But it isn’t a record that portends constant national championship contention.
Again, I think Boeheim is a good comparison. Syracuse makes the tournament nearly every year. But they are only a true contender for a championship every once in a while. The supposition that Florida built a program like Duke, Kentucky or UCLA under Donovan is misguided.
The Mike White Standard
In White’s time at Florida, he has a winning percentage of .657. In that same 35 game season, he would average 23 wins, a tick off of Donovan.
The same gap in performance is seen if we look at point differential, something I think is a better measure than won/loss record (especially in smaller sample sizes). White’s teams have averaged 77.1 points for and 68.2 points against, for a differential of 8.9 points. Donovan’s teams averaged 75.8 points for and 65.5 points against, for a differential of 10.3 points.
Of course, if we look at Donovan’s first three years at Florida, his point differential was 4.6.
As many people will point out, that isn’t completely fair to Donovan, as the program he inherited was worse than the one White inherited from Donovan. It is true that the Gators were coming off of a 12-16 season, but they were also only two years removed from an appearance in the Final Four.
I will stipulate that there was more work to do for Donovan than there was for White, but let’s not pretend that Florida was the equivalent of Northwestern prior to Donovan’s arrival.
And if you look at point differential, there’s actually a fairly promising story to tell for White.
The chart above shows the Gators point differential since the 1996-1997 season. The red circles indicate Final Four appearances. There appears to be a threshold for teams to reach that point, and White’s teams have not yet achieved that threshold.
But the good news is that he is getting close. After achieving a point differential of 5.5 in year one, the Gators increased that to 11.4 in his second season. That metric took a step back this year to 9.9, and so it shouldn’t be a surprise that this team wasn’t quite as good as the one from the 2016-2017 season.
And that leads us to a discussion of talent.
Recruiting
One of the reasons that Donovan is more Jim Boeheim than Coach K is based on recruiting.
In Donovan’s last six seasons at Florida, he had a national recruiting ranking average of 24.3. His best ranking was 5th and his worst was 58th. In the same timeframe, Duke had an average ranking of 11.3. More than that, Duke brought in 1.8 5-star recruits per year in that span, compared to 0.8 for Florida.
Mike White started out rough in his transition year, with a national recruiting ranking of 69th. He has followed that up with rankings of 20th in 2017 and now 17th in 2018. That 2018 class includes 5-star point guard Andrew Nembhard (26th nationally) and 4-stars Noah Locke (69th nationally) and Keyontae Johnson (80th nationally).
And that is important when looking at the differences between the 2016-2017 seasons and the 2017-2018 seasons. That 69th ranked class consisted of three 3-star recruits: Eric Hester (140th nationally), Dontay Bassett (290th nationally) and Gorjok Gak (248th nationally). None of those players played major minutes this season.
But the team lost 5-star talents Kasey Hill (8th nationally) and Devin Robinson (18th nationally) from the team that made the Elite-8. That meant White had to lean on transfers Jalen Hudson (197th nationally) and Egor Koulechov (340th nationally) as starters. Those players played quite well, but they also have limitations.
White had to lean on Hudson and Koulechov because he’s still making up for that transition year lapse in recruiting. But White has also is recruited at a level on-par with Donovan the past two cycles.
The national rankings of Donovan’s last six classes were 5th, 58th, 18th, 34th, 14th and 17th. White’s three classes at Florida have ranked 69th, 20th, and 17th.
The loss of Chiozza (44th nationally) will be a hit. But Nembhard, Locke and Johnson will immediately be three of the most talented Gators. If Egbunu decides to come back after testing the NBA Draft waters, this team could be a contender as soon as next season.
Takeaway
My freshman year, I watched in my dorm room as Florida lost to Mateen Cleaves for the championship and assumed that it was the beginning of a dominant era of basketball at Florida. Instead, Donovan’s teams followed that season up with losses in either the first or second round of the tournament.
Then in the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007 seasons, Donovan caught lightning in a bottle with Joakim Noah, Al Horford and Corey Brewer (who were ranked 73rd, 42nd and 23rd nationally, by the way). That’s true both from the perspective that they turned into the players they became, but also because they decided to stay an extra year in an era when nobody stays.
Mike White is going to be held to the championship standard that Billy Donovan set, and I think that’s fair. But let’s also be fair to White. He inherited a program coming off of a 16-17 season that had a point differential of 3.6 points. It wasn’t a very good team, and turning that around will take some time.
White has proven that he can coach, shown by his impact on the point differential metric referenced above. In the past two seasons, White’s teams have been better or close to the average under Donovan (10.2 points). He’s also showing he can recruit at Donovan’s level. This isn’t a McElwain situation.
With McElwain, his recruiting lagged well behind his three predecessors in every way in each of his first three years. Heck, Dan Mullen just put together a class that rivals any of the ones put together by McElwain in his time at Florida.
But ever since his transition year, White has proven that he will bring in similar quality players to Donovan. That bodes well for being able to accomplish similar things to what Donovan accomplished. That doesn’t mean he’ll win multiple national championships. But it does mean he should be able to compete for SEC Championships.
I love Florida fans. They are passionate and really care about their teams. Part of that passion means that when things don’t go well, questions are asked about what needs to be changed, sometimes forcefully. When it came to the football team this past season, they were correct to want to move on from McElwain, many of them sooner than I was.
But I don’t think that makes sense with White. His teams are performing the way you would expect based on the quality of player he has, and he has reinforcements coming soon. Give him two more years to develop them and bring in more talent, and if we’re having this same discussion at that point I’ll have to eat some crow.
But I think it may end up the other way around. These metrics suggest the program is moving in the right direction.