Thomas Haugh, Tebowmania and the Florida Gators’ Final Four serendipity


The Athletic has live coverage of Houston vs. Tennessee in the Elite Eight of the Men’s NCAA Tournament

SAN FRANCISCO — In summer 2022, the new Florida men’s basketball staff had zero wins, an auspicious but limited track record and one guarantee: Thomas Haugh, the lanky three-star recruit in the practice gym, was not leaving Gainesville without plans to come back. He was possibly the only human ever to be both a native of New Oxford, Pa., and a die-hard Florida fan. A 6-foot-9 devotee of Tim Tebow Mania. If anyone was going to run to the front of the line, it was him.

“They had to do a lot wrong for Tommy not to show up and be a Gator the next day,” Ryan Haugh, Thomas’ father, said Saturday on the Chase Center floor. “That was his lifelong dream. He bled orange and blue while the rest of Pennsylvania was bleeding blue and white.”

These are the serendipities that college basketball teams ride into April without knowing they’re on that ride until they get there. First, there is a very tall kid from a town of about 2,000 people who plays quarterback. Then that kid falls for the stylings of a Heisman Trophy winner. Then that kid gets too tall to be a quarterback anymore, grows yet another couple of inches and plays basketball well enough to catch the eye of an assistant coach at Richmond.

Then that assistant coach becomes an assistant coach at Florida and takes another look. The player can’t say yes quickly enough. And in less than three years, there is Thomas Haugh on Saturday evening, turning to the crowd with a smile on his face and his arms spread wide, celebrating the moment that Florida clinched its first trip to the Final Four in more than a decade. A moment that wouldn’t have happened without him. A moment that is the residue of a lot of other ones that might not have happened at all but did.

So Thomas Haugh scores 20 points, grabs 11 rebounds and hits two 3-pointers in the final three minutes to supercharge a No. 1 seed’s comeback from oblivion. Florida beats Texas Tech 84-79, securing the first spot in San Antonio next week. As fate would have it. “I feel like I’m dreaming,” Haugh said, with a souvenir championship baseball cap pulled low over his brow. “I was watching the round of 64 in the eighth grade, sneaking my phone into science class. Now, to say I’m playing in the Final Four is wild. It’s wild.”

And it’s, of course, not entirely providence.

Florida’s staff has built this monster of a roster by relying on its instincts and calculations in player evaluations, entirely unconcerned if they don’t align with whatever the consensus is. It’s a belief in seeing things a little differently that traces back to operating as part of an Ivy League operation years and years ago. It’s comfort with risky convictions. And it’s the process that gets you a hero of an Elite Eight game.

Haugh was, in the words of Florida assistant coach Kevin Hovde, “an insane late bloomer.” Six feet 7 going into his senior year of high school, maybe not as comprehensively serious about basketball as Division I coaches would prefer until a couple of years before that. He was on the radar when Hovde worked at Richmond. He was not, however, a must-sign no-brainer.

But Haugh did bloom, even if he needed a prep school stopover to do so. And once Hovde joined Todd Golden’s new coaching staff at Florida, the pair doubled back. Their re-evaluation recommended Haugh as a player worth adding, even if the particulars of the picture remained fuzzy. “He has a very high floor in his game,” Hovde said amid Florida’s celebration Saturday. “I thought he could defend at this level, and he has a great feel. He’s easy to play with. So I thought no matter what, he’s going to be able to play a role. But he’s surpassed our expectations.”

They imagined a steep trajectory. They got a player who is nimbly climbing a sheer cliff face.

Haugh’s per-40-minute rebounding is basically static from his first season to this one. But he’s almost incomprehensibly gone from a 45.7 percent free-throw shooter as a freshman to 80.4 percent as a sophomore. He’s better than doubled his assist rate (6.9 percent to 14.1), becoming what Golden calls a “pressure release” for the Gators guards. His 3-point shooting jumped from 25.5 percent to 33 percent, and through 37 games, he led one of the deepest and most talented teams in the nation with .225 Win Shares per 40 minutes.

Also, he comes off the bench. For all but seven of the games he’s played in two years. “He’s a winning player,” Golden said. “He just finds ways to impact the game and to help the team. One of, if not the most unselfish guys out there, just being comfortable coming off the bench when he could be starting for pretty much any team in America.”

Haugh is, essentially, the avatar for Florida’s plan and the success it’s engendering. The Gators have welcomed players other power-conference programs might not take. Though the idea was to create depth that can overwhelm teams, this also requires players willing to be depth components. The Gators, meanwhile, have been unflappable — their longest losing streak this year is one game — because they have so many alternatives for whomever might not have it on a given night.

So here was Haugh, a 9.5 points per game scorer once again content in a reserve role in the Elite Eight. Then he logged 30 minutes — third most of any Florida player against Texas Tech — and stepped into a 3-pointer to make it a six-point game with 2:50 to play. And another to make it a one-possession contest less than 30 seconds later. Walter Clayton Jr. might have taken it from there, but there was nowhere to take it without Haugh’s confidently seizing those two moments.

“I just got the ball and I was like, probably need a 3-pointer here, so just throw one up and see if it goes in,” Haugh said with a laugh. “No, my teammates found me, and I made the shots. Which, thank God, I did.”

His parents still might not quite grasp why a football player from Gainesville, Fla., caught hold with a kid from a pin dot in Pennsylvania — “I questioned every day why there was orange and blue in our house,” said Ryan Haugh, a former football player at Division II Shippensburg University — but they rolled with it. Jennifer Haugh even put Tim Tebow’s book in front of her son. And at any rate, there were worse idols to have.

“His drive, his tenacity, just never quit,” Ryan Haugh said. “That sunk in a little bit. As you saw today.”

And that brought everyone to Florida, and that brought Florida to a Final Four. Amid the postgame hubbub, Thomas Haugh wondered aloud about meeting Tebow someday. This almost surely will happen after what transpired Saturday at the Chase Center. The happy coincidences in Thomas Haugh’s story are being steadily replaced by sure things.

“Obviously,” Golden said of the selfless sophomore who helped will the Gators to San Antonio, “he’s going to start for us next year.”

(Photo: Kyle Terada / Imagn Images)





Source link

RELATED ARTICLESMORE FROM AUTHOR