National champs of Gators past see common thread with current titleholders | Frenette

As courtside witnesses to the University of Florida national championship run all season, Gator assistant basketball coach Taurean Green and game-day radio analyst Lee Humphrey often felt like they were taking a trip down memory lane to those back-to-back NCAA titles almost 20 years ago.

Certainly not with the repeated dramatic finishes in which Florida won four of six tournament games by razor-thin margins, something the 2006 and ’07 teams mostly avoided.

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But what felt eerily familiar to Green and Humphrey — the starting backcourt tandem under legendary UF coach Billy Donovan — was the relentless energy and toughness that propelled the current Gators of head coach Todd Golden to the top of the college basketball mountain.

Green and Humphrey — paired alongside frontcourt starters and longtime NBA fixtures Al Horford, Joakim Noah and Corey Brewer — formed the starting five on what many consider to be the most famous Gators’ team in any sport.

“The thing I can say about this team that’s similar to our team was they’re elite competitors,” said Green, a former starting point guard for the Gators who returned to UF as Golden’s Director of Player Development in 2022. “They play for each other and had the will to win. Playing for Florida meant something to them.

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“If you don’t have coachable guys, it’s not going to be good. This year’s team had that in common with our team back in the day. There was an elite level of buy-in.”

Humphrey, like his backcourt mate, spent the bulk of his pro career playing in Europe, while Brewer, Noah and Horford (still active with the Boston Celtics) have a combined 44 seasons of NBA experience.

As primarily a three-point shooter, Humphrey has a deep appreciation for how Florida’s three-guard offense of Walter Clayton Jr., Will Richard and Alijah Martin carried the scoring load, but pushes back on the narrative that the Gators navigated the NCAA tournament on the back of Clayton’s offensive brilliance (two 30-point games against Texas Tech in the Elite Eight and Auburn in the national semifinals).

“This team was so deep, I thought we could still win comfortably with Walter having an average game,” said Humphrey, a 10-year Jacksonville resident and salesman for the Adecco Group, who runs his own basketball camp (leehumphreybasketball.com) at Cornerstone Classical Academy.

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“We wore down teams with our size and speed. Late in the second half, you saw teams that could barely get up and down the floor, especially Johnni Broome with Auburn.”

Donovan’s title teams more dominant

Unlike the Florida team that cut down the nets last week in San Antonio, which featured five prominent transfers (Clayton, Richard, Martin and centers Rueben Chinyelu and Micah Handlogten), the previous back-to-back champions were all recruited out of high school by Donovan.

It was long before the transfer portal and NIL money became part of the hoops landscape. Another factor that made the 2025 tournament run far different than Donovan’s Gators was the stress factor.

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Of the 12 tournament games in 2006 and ’07, only the 57-53 win over Georgetown at the first Sweet 16, then 65-57 over Butler in the next Sweet 16, did Florida get pushed to the end.

A Brewer three-point play with 28 seconds left put the Gators on top to stay against Georgetown. Butler led UF 54-53 with 3:20 left, but a Horford three-point play ignited a 12-3 run to end that game.

This year, Florida trailed UConn, Texas Tech, Auburn and Houston in the NCAA title game by second-half margins of 6, 10, 9 and 12 points, respectively.

Against Tech, things looked especially bleak with UF down 75-66 and under three minutes remaining. But a pair of three-pointers by both Thomas Haugh and Clayton, sandwiched around a pair of missed one-and-one free throws by the Raiders, transformed into an 84-79 victory.

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“We weren’t coming back the entire game in the NCAA tournament like this year’s team,” said Humphrey. “The games were pretty stressful to watch for a lot of fans, a bit frustrating because I knew we could play better offensively than we were.

“But the guys didn’t let any kind of adversity discourage them. They always fought.”

Gators had that clutch gene

Whatever Florida needed in those crunch-time moments on both ends of the floor, somebody delivered. Two Clayton three-pointers ignited an 18-point outburst in the final three minutes against UConn.

Auburn went 3:28 without scoring in the homestretch of UF’s 79-73 victory. In the title game against Houston, a low-scoring slugfest that was a perfect scenario for Kelvin Sampson’s team to prevail, the Gators beat the Cougars at their own game.

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UF led for only 1:03 against Houston. The Cougars, who were 33-0 when holding opponents under 70 points, went scoreless the last 2:04.

Despite Clayton not hitting his first field goal until 7:54 remained, the Gators prevailed because they forced turnovers on UH’s last two possessions and also got a Haugh block on L.J. Crier with 52 seconds left when trailing 63-62.

“We didn’t have a dominant performance offensively the whole tournament, but we found ways to win in the second half when it mattered,” said Green. “Everybody showed up and made winning plays when they needed to.”

Can Golden be Donovan 2.0?

The unknown for Florida basketball moving forward is whether the Gators can sustain excellence after winning it all as they did under Donovan, a recent selection to the Pro Basketball Hall of Fame.

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Over Donovan’s next seven seasons after back-to-back titles, the program averaged 27.1 wins per year, made five NCAA tournaments, two Elite Eights and one Final Four.

While the Gators have a solid returning frontcourt, can returning guards Denzel Aberdeen and Urban Klavzar make enough strides to help offset UF losing the best backcourt in America?

Humphrey believes the analytics-driven program Golden has put together, and the way he used transfers from mid-major programs to build a championship team, will give him leverage with future Gators to keep Florida a perennial national contender.

“Todd is ahead of the game when it comes to style and strategy,” said Humphrey. “It’s a big reason why we wear teams down in the second half. Teams that don’t have Golden’s modern approach struggle. He’s got a style more similar to the NBA — shoot threes, get out and run, put defenses in tough situations. It’s a reason UF is exciting to watch. Players are excited to play in that kind of system.

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“I think Todd has laid the foundation and has the right people in people to sustain Florida basketball at a high level. Todd is exceptional. He’s going to have Florida at or near the top of college basketball for a long time.”

From one championship past to the present, the Gators are a basketball school again after just three seasons with Golden running the show. The question now hovering over Gainesville is whether fourth-year head coach Billy Napier can do the same for football.

gfrenette@jacksonville.com; (904) 359-4540; Follow him on X, formerly Twitter, at @genefrenette

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Back-to-back Gators champions Green, Humphrey see selves in current team