Inside the SEC: Tennessee’s Gainey, Florida’s Doing Whatever it Takes

“They both told me ‘Coach, we need him,’” Barnes told Hoops HQ. “Bowden said, ‘That kid’s a problem.’”

Gainey’s numbers at USC Upstate backed that up. As a freshman in 2021-22, he shot .493 from three and averaged 13.8 points. As a sophomore, he averaged 15.2.

Notice that the intel Barnes got on Gainey didn’t come from his father. After his son entered the portal, Justin Gainey wanted no part of his recruitment.

“I wanted him to decide what was best for him,” the elder Gainey said. “He wasn’t going to come here because I’m his dad. Coach Barnes did the best job of recruiting him. He made him feel important and shared the vision he saw for him.”

Last season, that vision didn’t materialize, but it was no fault of Jordan’s. Another player who transferred from a mid-major to Tennessee, Dalton Knecht, had a monster year and became the SEC’s Player of the Year and the winner of the Julius Erving Small Forward of the Year Award. Fifth-year seniors Santiago Vescovi and Josiah-Jordan James took up a lot of minutes and needed their shots. So did Zeigler. Gainey played in 36 games and averaged 18.4 minutes, but his numbers were well off his career-bests (6.8 ppg, .291 3-PT).

This season, Gainey has come into his own, in part because of necessity and in part because of hard work. The Illinois game was no fluke – he followed that performance with 17 points, five steals, two rebounds, two assists and two blocks against Western Carolina. He’s second on the team behind Lanier in scoring (12.0 ppg) and three-point percentage (.431) and third in assists, steals and blocks.

Gainey spent the offseason regaining confidence in his jump shot, but more importantly, working on using his 6-foot-4, 195 pound frame to get to the basket. “It’s all about reading my defender,” Gainey said. “They’re going to close out hard on shot fakes and respect my shooting. But any time they close out on me hard, I know I have a lane to go the rim.”

Advanced analytics complete the story of Gainey’s emergence. In his first three seasons, Gainey shot a combined .443 from two-point range. This season, he’s shooting .625, in part because he’s getting to the rim more, but in part because of a reliable mid-range jumper. He’s shooting .512 from the field.

Despite all that, Barnes sees Gainey’s improvement through a different lens.

“Where I think Jordan’s improved the most is defensively,” Barnes said. “I mean, offensively, he’s one of those guys, really, when he gets his feet set and shoots it, I think it’s going in, and he’s become a terrific downhill driver. He’s been able to start scoring at all three levels. But defensively, he’s gotten better.”

Needless to say, Justin Gainey is happy the way things turned out for his son. “During that moment [before the last-second shot against Illinois], I didn’t get a chance to be Dad; I was his coach,” Gainey says. “Here’s the play. Let’s go. Jordan [who scored 18 second-half points] was the hot hand. That’s who we went with. But as a dad, when that ball went in, I was proud, proud to see him and his team celebrate. It’s one of those moments you wouldn’t trade for anything.”

Florida’s Clayton has no regrets after choosing hoops over football

In another life, Florida’s fifth-year senior guard Walton Clayton, Jr. might be playing free safety for an NFL team.

Coming out of Bartow High School in 2021, he had his pick of elite football schools. Home state Florida wanted him. So did Notre Dame, Nebraska, Georgia, Tennessee and many others. But basketball was his first love and though Covid and other factors limited his recruitment, that’s the sport he chose to play in college.

Hoops scholarship offers were slim, but when a name he recognized – Rick Pitino – called offering a chance to play at Iona, Clayton jumped at it.

Clayton was a winner in high school—he helped lead Bartow to a pair of 6A state championships—and he quickly became one in college, too. As a sophomore at Iona in 2022-23, he averaged 16.8 ppg, led the nation in free-throw percentage (.953) and helped the Gaels win regular-season and tournament titles in the Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference. That March, Clayton delivered 15 points, four rebounds and four assists against eventual national champion UConn in the NCAA Tournament.

After the season, it was time to make another decision. Pitino left for St. John’s and Clayton could have joined him, but the lure of home was strong – and there was another important reason to return to Florida. On Dec. 11, 2023, Clayton became a father, and he wanted to be a presence in daughter Leilani Leigh’s life.

Had Clayton decided to play football, it probably would have been at Florida. His decision to play basketball for the Gators became even easier after his daughter was born.

Clayton had no trouble adjusting to a higher level of competition. In his first season in the SEC, he led Florida in scoring with 17.6 ppg, the highest average by a Gator since 2003-04 (Anthony Roberts, 17.9). After last season, he dabbled in the NBA Draft process but heeded the advice of several teams and returned to school.

“The main thing they wanted to see is somebody who can contribute to winning,” Clayton says.

In other words, the NBA wanted to see whether the 6-foot-3 Clayton could also play point guard. When Florida signed 6-foot-2 grad transfer Alijah Martin from FAU, it freed Clayton to make plays for others. He leads the 12-0 Gators in scoring (17.6 ppg), but also in assists (3.5 apg). Martin is second in both categories. The partnership has worked so far.

Florida coach Todd Golden never doubted Clayton could score or facilitate.

“He’s a great [scoring] threat on the ball at all times,” Golden told me last summer. “He can shoot it from super deep. He’s fantastic in transition. He’s capable of getting 30 on any night, but he’s also capable of getting six to 10 assists depending on what the defense is giving up.”

Clayton thinks Florida, with a strong returning nucleus fortified by some astute portal acquisitions, “can go as far as we want to go.” But sometimes, he can’t help but wonder where he’d be if he had chosen the gridiron instead of the hardwood. “Whenever my friends or family bring it up, they joke that I could have played three years in college and gone on to the NFL,” he says. “But I don’t look back too much. Right now, I’m focusing on basketball. Whatever my team needs from me, that’s what they’re going to get.”

Around the Rim

• On many teams in Division I, Jason Edwards and Tyler Tanner would be starting. At Vanderbilt, they’re coming off the bench as part of a deep guard rotation that first-year coach Mark Byington has used to great effect in leading the Commodores to an 11-1 record.

The well-traveled Edwards – who started his career at Division II Miles College in 2021-22, played in junior college the following season and earned first-team all American Athletic Conference honors at North Texas last year – is working on a streak of 39 straight games scoring in double-figures dating to last season. He’s second in the SEC in scoring (18.9 ppg), had a 30-point game against TCU and scored 26 against Drake.

He’s ready to roll when the calendar flips to January and SEC play begins.

“I’m fired up to go into the SEC season with this team and play really challenging teams,” Edwards says. “It’s going to be a challenging season. I don’t think any team is going to run through the SEC season undefeated. You might go through a stretch of a loss or two, but this is a great team to do that with. We’re not going to hang our head; we’re going to come in every day ready to work.”

Tanner, a Nashville native who played Brentwood Academy – the same high school as former Commodore and NBA lottery pick Darius Garland – has put up ridiculous numbers. The 6-foot point guard has 28 assists without a turnover and leads all Division I freshmen in steals (29). He comes by the latter skill honestly. Both his parents played basketball at Rice, and his father owns the old Southwest Conference career steals record (291) and the Owls’ single-season record (95).

“I never want to get scored on,” Tanner says. “I learned a lot from my dad. He’s taught me a lot about defense, about trying to get steals with quick hands and getting in the passing lanes.”

• Georgia (11-1) picked up some more firepower when De’Shayne Montgomery regained academic eligibility after transferring from Mount St. Mary’s. He missed the first 10 games of the season, but his debut in the Bulldogs’ 100-49 victory over Buffalo on Dec. 19 was impressive and his follow-up against Charleston Southern on Dec. 22 even better.

In 20 minutes against the Bulls, Montgomery, a 6-foot-5 sophomore, scored 16 points in just 20 minutes. The Bulldogs didn’t have to watch hours of tape on Montgomery or his teammate at Mount St. Mary’s, Dakota Leffew, a 6-foot-4 graduate student. The Mountaineers played at Athens last season, and the pair toasted Georgia for a combined 49 points. Leffew, who has played in all 12 games, is third on the team in scoring (12.9 ppg) and leads in three-point percentage (.410). He was the ‘Dogs’ second-leading scorer against Charleston Southern (19 points).

“We recruited each one individually,” Georgia coach Mike White said after the game. “They had a different, unique process that was about them. De’Shayne committed first, and then we asked him for his help. And Dakota, they took a couple more visits. They had hard decisions to make because they had a number of high-level programs after them. We’re fortunate to get one. We’re really fortunate to get both. We knew a year ago both were SEC-level players.”

Behind their deep guard rotation and the play of 6-foot-11 freshman Asa Newell, the Bulldogs have matched their best start since 2001-02. This is just the 10^th time Georgia has reached double-digit wins before losing its second game in 119 seasons of basketball.

• Alabama went 33 days without a home game. That sounds like a schedule a mid-major team trying to earn guarantee money might play, but Alabama coach Nate Oats had a different agenda – challenging a team that’s perceived as a national championship contender.

After starting the season with three consecutive home games, the last on Nov. 11 against McNeese, the Crimson Tide played at Purdue, faced off against Illinois in Birmingham, played Houston, Rutgers, and Oregon in the Players Era Festival in Las Vegas and went to North Carolina as part of the SEC/ACC Challenge.

Alabama finally returned home on Dec. 14, beat Creighton, then took another trip – to Grand Forks, ND to play North Dakota in what amounted to a senior day for Grant Nelson, a native of Devils Lake, ND who started his college career at North Dakota State. That game turned out to be more difficult than Oats and his staff might have anticipated – Alabama won 97-90 – but Nelson put on a show for friends and family, finishing with 23 points and 10 rebounds.

“We came off a pretty tough seven-game stretch and played some good teams, but give North Dakota a lot of credit, they wanted this game, they were ready for it, the crowd was great, and our guys didn’t really come out ready to play,” Oats said after the game. “We’ve got some improvements we need to make and particularly on the defensive end. I thought Grant played well coming back home.”

• Oklahoma’s Jeremiah Fears is the gift that keeps on giving. The 6-foot-4 freshman guard, who decommitted from Illinois in July and signed with the Sooners (12-0), kept their unbeaten start going with a 30-point effort against Michigan on Dec. 18 that included a game-winning four-point play. Things looked grim for the Sooners, trailing 86-83 with 12.9 seconds to play, but Fears pulled up from beyond the arc and launched an off-balance 30-footer that went in and tied the score at 86.

Fears was fouled on the shot, made a free-throw with 11.5 second left, and the Sooners escaped with an 87-86 win after Michigan’s Tre Donaldson missed a three at the buzzer. With only a Dec. 29 home game against Prairie View standing in their way, it appears the Sooners, like Tennessee and Florida, will enter SEC play undefeated.

• For two years at Florida and, this season, a couple of months at Mississippi State, Riley Kugel’s college career has been a mixed bag of impressive performances (especially during the latter part of his freshman season), disappearing acts and moves in and out of the starting lineup. Last spring, Bulldogs coach Chris Jans took a chance and signed him out of the transfer portal. And true to form, Kugel’s play has been up one game, down the next.

Kugel, a 6-foot-5 junior, has started five times, but Jans recently pulled him from the lineup in favor of Boston College transfer Claudell Harris, Jr. The wakeup call paid off in an important Dec. 21 win at Memphis. Harris posted a 2-for-12 shooting performance and six points, but Kugel came off the bench and scored a team-high 19 points while going 8-for-13 from the field, 3-for-7 from behind the arc and handing out a pair of assists.

After the Memphis game, Jans said he thought Kugel was in for a good afternoon when he made his first shot. “He just looked so pure and so confident,” Jans said. “… Hopefully, [this game] can give him confidence going forward.”

Games to Watch

Ole Miss at Memphis on Saturday, Dec. 28 (ESPN2). The SEC’s Mississippi schools will be looking for a sweep of the Tigers in Memphis after Mississippi State won there on Dec. 21, knocking the then-No. 21-ranked Tigers out of the AP poll.

Stetson at Florida, Sunday, Dec. 29 (SECN+). The Hatters are well coached by former Florida assistant coach Donnie Jones, who was on Billy Donovan’s staff when the Gators won consecutive national championships in 2006-07, but they should be no match for Florida, which means the Gators (12-0) will remain unbeaten heading into conference play.

Oakland at Arkansas, Monday, Dec. 30 (ESPNU). Was this game scheduled before coach John Calipari took over at Arkansas, or is he just trying to get back at Oakland and long-time coach Greg Kampe for knocking Kentucky out of the first round of the NCAA Tournament last March? That was one of the more stunning upsets in the tournament, and had the outcome gone a different way, Cal might still be plying his trade in Lexington, not Fayetteville.

Norfolk State at Tennessee, Dec. 31 (SECN+). Judging by the Vols’ margin of victory (30.1 ppg) in their home games this season, the chances of the Spartans pulling an upset are somewhere around nil. And that means, like Florida, Tennessee (12-0) will start the SEC portion of its schedule with an unblemished record.