Sportsfrog.com

Losing to Vandy at Vandy (and that weird floor and atmosphere)? No biggie. Happens to a lot of teams. And this year’s Vanderbilt team is pretty damn good.

Getting blown out by an LSU team that is struggling to make the NIT and didn’t have their best player on the floor yesterday? That feels like a little more of a biggie. Especially when you consider LSU is last in the SEC and had dropped nine of their last ten.

Luke Winn, one half of si.com’s fine college basketball writing talent (with the incomparable Grant Wahl), tries to figure out if it is “just” complacency with the defending champs, or if there is another problem beyond that:

“Should we chalk up what happened on Saturday to boredom or complacency and say, Don’t worry, they’ll flip the switch back on when it matters? Florida did, after all, already have the SEC title locked up before it road-tripped to the Bayou (clinching it Wednesday against South Carolina) and it also suffered through a similarly timed slump last season (losing to Arkansas, Tennessee and Alabama in late February) before sweeping the SEC and NCAA tournaments. Or should we worry that the Gators are awkwardly backing into the big dance? If you were hoping to hear them assuage your doubts … then you probably shouldn’t keep reading. ‘We can’t just plan to flip the switch,’ said junior forward Corey Brewer, who finished with 11 points and four turnovers. ‘In the tournament, teams are going to be bringing their best at us, and if we’re playing like this, we’re going to lose. We’re living dangerously right now, and if we don’t fix it in the next couple of games, we could have problems.’”

At the least, those quotes make me think this too shall pass. Florida has enough players with their heads screwed on straight to understand the problem and deal with it. Brewer is right, the Gators cannot rely on being able to simply “flip a switch”, but the important thing is that he (and, therefore, his teammates) knows that.

I would guess that Florida will get its house in order during the SEC tournament, and that another deep run in the tournament is in the offing, vomitous performance in Baton Rouge notwithstanding.

By the way, Glenn Davis and his significant inside presence was the player that LSU was missing, and Joakim Noah, alleged top five NBA pick, responded to the glaring absence in the middle by racking up 4 points and 3 rebounds in 21 minutes. Um, that’s not exactly the kind of production you might have expected there from a guy rated as highly as he is. At all.