Georgia Hires Hoops Coach Who Can't Win Big, Is Shocked When He Can't Win Big
Anyone paying attention to White's runs at Florida could have seen this coming a mile away.
The Georgia Bulldogs have, once again, flamed out in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, and their fans are starting to wonder if they made the wrong choice for head coach.
In 2022, the Bulldogs bought out Mike White from their biggest rival, Florida, and gave him a pay raise in the process.
Normally, you can tell if you made the right hire if the opposing fanbase is mad at you or upset about their coach leaving, but Gator fans weren't exactly crying the blues after "losing" White.
To this day, Florida fans are still reminding Georgia fans how awful a decision they made, and it's safe to say after four years that the Gators won the "trade."
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It's truly insane to see anyone shocked by these past two performances from the Bulldogs and Mike White in the NCAA Tournament, because if anyone was paying attention, the signs were there.
While at Florida, a school with far more resources allocated towards basketball than Georgia, White was an abject disappointment.
After a down year and an NIT appearance in year one, White guided the Gators to the Elite 8 in just his second year in Gainesville.
Impressive, but looking back on it, he nearly choked away a ten-point second half lead against Wisconsin in the Sweet 16, a game in which he needed Chris Chiozza to hit a miracle three-point runner as time expired in overtime to rescue the Gators from the jaws of defeat.
White and the Gators were then gifted a potential trip to the Final Four when 7-seed South Carolina upset Duke and Baylor to reach the regional final.
This was the same South Carolina team that the Gators beat by 15 just one month earlier.
But Florida bowed out and after this, White never made it out of the first weekend of the tournament again as the Gators' head coach.
This wasn't for lack of talent, mind you.
I mentioned Chiozza above, who played for multiple NBA teams and is still playing professional basketball in Italy, but the talent pool goes even deeper than that.
Six total players under Mike White played in the NBA at some point and even with that talent, in addition to multiple top-100 high school prospects, White never had a single-digit loss season after that Elite 8 run in 2017.
For crying out loud, he won only 19 games with THIS roster:
If he wasn't able to get it done at Florida, a place where the two coaches he was sandwiched between (Billy Donovan and Todd Golden) were able to win both SEC Championships and National Championships, then what made anyone think he was going to do better at Georgia?
Mike White is who he is.
He lifted the floor of the Bulldogs' basketball program, but if Georgia fans are looking for tournament success or any relevant banners to hang in Stegman Coliseum, they might want to put up a help-wanted sign outside.
Anyone who was paying attention to White's runs at Florida could have seen this coming a mile away.
Thursday night's beatdown at the hands of Saint Louis is just a microcosm of who White is as a coach, and Georgia fans need to figure out if that's good enough for their program.