Butler next to try and knock off top-seeded Gators

NCAA Basketball Betting Lines

03/23/2007 - St. Louis. MO (Sportsbook Betting Lines) - It has been 15 years since the NCAA Tournament had a school win back-to-back titles, but the Florida Gators are on their way to taking care of that issue as they suit up against the Butler Bulldogs in the Sweet 16 round of the 69th annual event from the Edward Jones Dome in St. Louis tonight.

The top-seeded Gators ran through the field a year ago and defeated UCLA by a score of 73-57 to capture the crown and are hoping to repeat the feat here in 2007. After winning the SEC Tournament for the third straight time, the Gators picked up where they left off last season by opening this year's tournament with a crushing 112-69 victory against Jackson State that set a record for the largest margin of victory in tournament history. Two days later Florida, which has now won 14 consecutive postseason outings, played a much closer contest versus Purdue in a 74-67 decision in New Orleans.

As for the fifth-seeded Bulldogs, the Midwest Region has provided matchups with Old Dominion in the first round and Maryland in the second. Butler, a team that lost in the title game of the Horizon League Tournament this year, could have easily lost to both previous opponents in this tournament, but with a 57-46 triumph against the Monarchs and a narrow 62-59 win versus the Terps in Buffalo last week the Bulldogs pushed their all-time NCAA Tournament record to 7-6 as they prepare for their toughest test of the season.

With respect to the all-time series between these two schools on the hardwood, Florida won the only previous meeting with a memorable 69-68 victory in the first round of the 2000 NCAA Tournament. That year, head coach Billy Donovan got his Gators to the championship game versus Michigan State before feeling the sting of an 89-76 setback.

The winner of this meeting will be back in action on Sunday versus the winner of the UNLV/Oregon contest for the right to move on to the Final Four in Atlanta.

Defense was the name of the game for the Bulldogs as they clamped down on Maryland, holding top performer D.J. Strawberry without a single point in the first half and a just eight points for the game. The Terps managed to finish the contest shooting 6-of-11 behind the three-point line, but a mere 7-of-15 effort at the charity stripe and 17 turnovers were just what the Bulldogs were hoping for as they moved to the Sweet 16 for the second time in school history. A.J. Graves responded with a team-high 19 points for Butler, converting 4-of-9 chances behind the three-point line, while Brandon Crone made good on 3-of-7 opportunities beyond the arc to come away with 13 points. Of the team's 52 field goal attempts, half came from behind the three-point line where the squad hit on 46.2 percent.

All season long the Bulldogs have turned to their defense to get the job done, and it has rarely failed them, ranking fifth in the nation with just 56.9 ppg allowed. Oddly enough, even though Butler found a way to stifle opponents, it still ranked just 300th in the country in blocked shots with less than two per game. Graves, the leading scorer for the group with his 17.0 ppg, is as close to perfect at the free-throw line (.958) as one can get, ranking second in the nation this season with his accuracy. Mike Green (14.1 ppg) takes care of getting the rest of the team involved with his 133 assists and is also first on the glass for the squad with close to six rebounds per game, while Crone accounts for 11.4 ppg, despite his mere 40.8 percent shooting from the floor.

Beating up Jackson State didn't prove much in the first round, as the Gators quickly learned versus Purdue in a much tighter matchup last weekend. Florida actually trailed by a bucket at the break, 31-29, but then the experience of the Gators took over as both Corey Brewer and Al Horford both recorded a team- high 17 points in the seven-point victory. Taurean Green chipped in with 14 points and Joakim Noah another nine as he also tied Horford for the rebounding lead with nine boards. Although he tallied a mere six points in 32 minutes of action, fellow starter Lee Humphrey did manage to knock down a couple of three- pointers to extend his school-record of hitting at least one trey per game to 35 straight. The team wound up shooting an even 50 percent from the field and outscored the Boilermakers at the charity stripe, 27-6, which helped to make up for 15 turnovers.

A perfect 6-0 in the month of March, the Gators have outscored opponents by an average of more than 20 ppg during the stretch, although a huge part of that was the crushing defeat of Jackson State in the first round of the tourney. Again, thanks to the win versus the Tigers, Horford is averaging a double-double in the two tourney games with 16 ppg and 12.5 rpg, shooting an incredible 76.5 percent from the field. For the season overall those numbers are slightly lower at 13.3 ppg and 9.3 rpg, but they were still tops on the program. With he and Noah (12.1 ppg, 8.3 rpg) are both shooting close to 62 percent from the field, the team as a whole is first in the nation with its 52.9 percent accuracy and is also fourth in the country in terms of rebounding margin with a +8.2 rpg.