Ray Glier

George Mason took care of some of the excuses your school has used for not being successful in college basketball.

• We don’t have their recruiting budget. We don’t get McDonald’s All-Americans.
• We’re a commuter school.

Then Florida took care of the excuse the BCS behemoths have used — We’re a football school.

It doesn’t work anymore. The Gators have the blueprint. Just Google Jeremy Foley. He is the Florida athletic director and he talked 24/7 about making a school a two-way powerhouse during the Final Four.

It starts with ambition, which Foley had 10 years ago. There were certainly some hiccups, and his coach had to grow into the role of a star on the bench to go with being a star recruiter, but Florida got there.

It took an $11 million practice facility. It took $10.6 million in renovation to O’Connell Center. It took ignoring Billy Donovan’s critics and making Donovan the second-highest paid coach in the SEC behind Kentucky’s Tubby Smith.

The Gators marketed their program and created a home court atmosphere that rivals The Swamp, their football stadium, in intensity and intimidation.

Foley made it work, and Florida is now a model. If the rest of the SEC schools get with it and stay with it, the SEC will leave the other five BCS conferences in the dust.

Remember, Florida is a job Rick Pitino told Donovan not to take because Pitino did not think it was a good job.

The SEC is full of jobs the basketball snobs would turn down.

LSU has a pipeline of home-grown talent. Tennessee has the effervescent Bruce Pearl. Alabama has very good in-state talent.

Mississippi has an intriguing young coach in Andy Kennedy, who learned a thing or two from Bob Huggins at Cincinnati about taking a smaller school and competing on a high level. Kennedy is from Mississippi and, as we have seen in this NCAA Tournament, home-grown talent can take you a long way.

Coach Dennis Felton has strong guards at Georgia and a commitment there to build a winner. The Bulldogs are doing their own facility upgrade.

Arkansas, even without Ronnie Brewer, has a chance to be good again and the Razorbacks, along with Kentucky and Vanderbilt, are the three SEC schools that think basketball before football.

The league has some caretakers worrying about basketball. Tennessee athletic director Mike Hamilton fixed a $1 million buyout to Pearl’s contract.

Ole Miss paid former coach Rod Barnes almost $900,000 in the 2004-05 season before trimming his salary to approximately $650,000 for the 2005-06 season after a poor season in 04-05. Barnes was eventually fired.

LSU is a laggard right now because John Brady makes $750,000. If he does not get a raise after taking his team to the Final Four we will know a) the Tigers don’t think he can coach b) they are not very serious about basketball, after all.

It can never be c) we don’t have enough money.

Florida has showed how it is done. The other football schools — LSU, Alabama, Tennessee, Georgia — have no excuses now because the Gators, the ultimate football school, just did the ultimate in basketball.

Florida is a model for other football schools, and for basketball schools, too.

Two notations stood out in my play-by-play in March. They make a point about the influence the Gators should have in the offseason.

The first notation, highlighted in yellow, came with 11:29 remaining in the Duke-LSU regional semifinal when Duke scored 54 points, its lowest total in 10 years. The Blue Devils made three passes on a possession, their best ball movement of the game against a good defensive team, and DeMarcus Nelson nailed a wide-open 3-pointer.

The next significant notation was on Florida’s first possession of the national championship game against UCLA, another strong defensive team. It was ball movement again, and the Gators' point guard Taurean Green had a wide open 3.

Green missed his 3, but that was not the biggest difference in the possessions.

It took Duke almost 30 minutes to break down LSU with the extra pass and then another pass after that. The first pass on some Blue Devils’ possession was the last pass.

Florida, on the other hand, had UCLA’s defense spinning in circles for 40 minutes. The Gators shared right from the tip.

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