March Madness is reaching a fevered pitch as the 2025 NCAA Tournament Final Four quickly approaches. In one bracket, the Southeastern Conference will see two of its top teams face off — the Florida Gators and Auburn Tigers — to see who advances to the national championship game.
With two days remaining until tipoff, both fanbases — and college basketball fans in general — are waiting with bated breath to see who prevails in this epic matchup, featuring a pair of the top players in the sport right now in Auburn's Johni Broome and Florida's Walter Clayton Jr. But make no mistake, both teams run deep and have plenty of other contributors who will make a difference in the final score.
Ahead of the semifinal round of this year's Big Dance, Todd Golden spoke to the media about how his team got to where it is, the matchup with Auburn and the Pearl family, and other pertinent topics.
What it takes to win close games
"Maturity. Confidence, maturity, our ability to not get too high or too low. We've shown it twice already the tournament, obviously with the UConn game — pretty good comeback in the second half that way – and obviously Saturday against Tech. We had our back against the wall a couple times there in the last five minutes of the game. Instead of letting our emotions get the best of us or pointing fingers, we did a good job staying the course.
"Obviously our guys did a good job understanding now or never (over the) last five minutes and made every big play down the stretch. But, again, the consistency, the maturity and their belief in each other is a big part of that."
What Golden tells his team in crunch time
"Definitely. The under 4 media, I think we were down nine or eight, whatever it was, and we had just missed a block-out and Christian Anderson was getting to the foul line. We have to make every winning play down the stretch to find a way to get this thing done. And, fortunately, we caught a couple breaks with them missing some free throws, but we did make a lot of winning plays those last five minutes, for sure."
On the rematch with Auburn in the Final Four
"Yeah, it's awesome that we get to play an SEC team. I think it's pretty special what the league was able to do this year, and getting a team in Auburn that we're very familiar with. Obviously competed against them two months ago, a program that we know a lot about; they obviously know a lot about us as well. Both teams have probably changed quite a bit since February 8th, when we played against each other.
"But I do think our first game gives us some confidence going into Saturday's tilt that we've played well against this team before, we understand they're going to have some tricks up their sleeve and some things they want to do differently this time around. We've going to have to adjust as well.
"But going into this game, I think we should have a good balance of confidence going into the matchup."
On Johni Broome picking Auburn over Florida
"When we got here, we were hoping that we'd be able to add Johni to our program. At the time, I probably had a little misunderstanding of kind of what I thought of myself as a head coach. Comparing Bruce to myself, Bruce was a lot more accomplished at the time.
"And I think it came down to our program or their program. And we had just got here. I think we were like a month and a half into the job, so we didn't have as much success to ...
