Bungle in “The Jungle:” Gators Shock No. 1 Tigers

AUBURN, Ala. – With just inside eight minutes to go in the first half Saturday, the Florida Gators huddled on their sideline with a one-point lead after taking an early punch from top-ranked Auburn and coolly, calmly working their way back into the game. 
 
UF coach Todd Golden looked across the scrum and locked in on his point guard, Walter Clayton Jr., who four nights earlier sat out the team’s previous Southeastern Conference with an ankle sprain. Golden took a good, long look at his senior leader and leading scorer and was thoroughly impressed at the air Clayton was giving off.
 
“He looked great, not winded,” Golden said. “I warned him at that point, ‘Dude, there’s a good chance you play 40 [minutes].’ He was like, ‘I got it.’ The rest is history.” 
 
Yeah, like the dictionary meaning of the word “history.” 
 
Clayton scored 19 points, with four 3s, and dimed his way to a career-high nine assists while playing (indeed) the entire 40 minutes, leading five different UF players into double-figure scoring and sparking sixth-ranked Florida to a 90-81 upset of No. 1 Auburn before a sold-out, frenzied crowd in the hostile venue known as “The Jungle.” 
 
The win, which came with fifth-year guard and second-leading scorer Alijah Martin scratched 30 minutes before the game with a hip pointer, marked the first against a No. 1 opponent on the road in team history and came a month after the Gators (20-3, 7-3) beat a top-ranked team, Tennessee, at home for the first time in its history. Talk about checking boxes, UF became just the sixth team of the Associated Press poll era to defeat two different teams ranked No. 1 in the same season. 
 
“Just an incredible win for our program,” Golden said. “I thought our guys were fantastic for 40 minutes.” 
 
All his guys. 
 
Clayton ran an offense that shot 48 percent, got 13 3-pointers (from six different players at 39.4 percent), made 15 of 18 free throws, posted a SEC-high 22 assists and braved one of the loudest arenas in the country by building a 21-point second-half lead. 

Sophomore forward Alex Condon scored 17 points and grabbed 10 rebounds for his fifth double-double of the season, plus four assists. Backup sophomore forward Thomas Haugh had 16 points, nine rebounds, three assists and three blocks. Senior guard Will Richard, after picking up two fouls in the game’s first three minutes, had 12 points and five rebounds in 31 minutes. Junior guard Denzel Aberdeen, stepping into the starting lineup for Martin (like he did Tuesday for Clayton), scored 10 points and dropped a pair if mega 3-balls in the second half. Sophomore guard Urban Klazvar went 3-for-3 from distance, including two in a row in the second half to build the big lead. 
 
Auburn, which lost for the first time in 11 home games this season (and for just the second in the last 26 over two seasons) was led by forward Johni Broome’s 18 points, 11 rebounds and six assists, but the favorite for 2025 NCAA Player of the Year was limited to eight field goals on 19 shots, while he traded body blows down low with Condon and the rest of the UF front court. The Gators held the Tigers, far and away the nation’s top-rated offense in efficiency, to 42.9 percent for the game and seven of 22 from the arc (31.8 percent).
 
What a week for the Gators, who seven days earlier got blasted 64-44 at Tennessee in the team’s lowest-scoring game in 35 years. They bounced back from that debacle by beating Vanderbilt without Clayton and then the top-of-the-poll Tigers minus Martin.
 
“We’ve all got a ‘next-man-up’ mentality,” said Clayton, whose first 3 of the game pushed him over 1,000 career points as a Gator, the 57th player to eclipse that milestone. “Alijah wasn’t on the court, but Alijah’s still there. He was talking the whole game. He was telling us what he’s seeing. Same thing when I was on the bench [Tuesday]. I was just telling the guys what I was seeing. So it was a lot of great communication between us, and we executed.”

Hopefully, those hundreds of Auburn students who pitched tents and camped out the last four days outside Neville had some fun during the 90 hours of run-up to seeing Coach Bruce Pearl and his beloved squad try to win their 15^th in a row.
 
‘Cause the two-hour payout probably wasn’t worth the wait. 
 
“Give Florida all the credit,” Pearl said. “They came in here like they had to win it. That’s how they played every possession. They played harder, they played better, they played more desperately. We did not look like the No. 1 team in the country, we did not act like the No. 1 team in the country, we didn’t prepare like it, and a result, we got beat.”
 
The Tigers (21-2, 9-1) got off to a quick start, building a 15-5 lead through the first six minutes, while the Gators were missing eight of their first 10 shots. The Auburn lead was nine, 20-11, when a Condon slam on a lob from Aberdeen and a 3-pointer by Klavzar started a 12-2 run that was finished by a Richard 3 and gave the Gators their first lead, 23-22, with 7:48 to go. Timeout Auburn.
 
That’s when Golden took measure of Clayton and believed his team was in a good place. 
 
“Walt knew what he had to do to get this win,” Aberdeen said. “He led us and everybody was ready to follow.”

Even after a 9-2 run by the Tigers got them back out to a six-point lead and the crowd at a fevered pitch. The Gators answered with a run of nine consecutive points, five by Clayton, that put his team back in front inside four minutes to play in the period. Stunningly, the Gators would not trail again. 
 
Florida led 48-38 at halftime, thanks to 57-percent shooting against the No. 11 defensive efficiency unit in the country. Barely four minutes into the second half, with UF dropping six of its first 11 shots, the lead had grown to 17 and blew up to 21 – at 68-47 – with 14 minutes to go after Klavzar banged his back-to-back 3s, giving the little-used sub with just three field goals through the team’s first 21 games five consecutive makes over the previous two games.
 
“You need guys to step up and make swing plays,” Golden said of Klavzar, who had a plus-17 on-court score in 17 minutes. “You’re not going to hold ’em to 50 and hope.”
 
Perhaps the biggest “swing play” came seven minutes later, after the Tigers had whacked the 21-point deficit to just nine, at 76-67, with “The Jungle” smelling blood. At Florida’s end, Aberdeen missed a short jumper that Haugh retrieved for a second possession. That possession ended with Clayton misfiring on a 3, but Haugh, again, crashed the glass, reaching over an Auburn player and tapping the ball out beyond the 3-point line, where Aberdeen retrieved it set up for a wide open shot. 
 
Swish. A three-shot possession to take the margin back to 12. 
 
“That’s just the kind of player I am,” said Haugh, who had a plus-19 on-court score. “It takes grit. Sometimes you got to just go do those things.”
 
Winning player. Winning play. 
 
Auburn managed to get back within nine twice in the final 90 seconds, but the Gators did not cave. 

“We came in with the right mentality. We went down at the start, but didn’t get too worked up about it. We just slowly came back and then we weren’t playing around with the lead. We were composed.”
 
And in doing so tamed “The Jungle” with one of the greatest regular-season victories in the 116 years of Florida basketball. 
 
“The biggest key was the mental toughness of our team,” Golden said of a fifth win in eight Quadrant 1 games, per the NCAA Evaluation Tool. “It’s a needle-mover in terms of NCAA seeding. It’s a needle-mover in terms of where we finish in the SEC.”
 
A seismic victory, to be sure. One for the history books. 

Email senior writer Chris Harry at chrish@gators.ufl.edu