Florida State had chances to make Tuesday night uncomfortable for No. 1 Florida. Instead, the Seminoles spent most of the evening fighting two losing battles at once: the three-point line and the glass.
The result was an 81-72 loss at the Donald L. Tucker Civic Center in a rivalry game that slipped away as FSU shot just 4-of-21 from deep and got beaten badly on the boards. Florida finished with a 41-29 rebounding edge, including 12 offensive rebounds, and turned that into 14 second-chance points.
Luke Loucks didn’t sugarcoat what went wrong.
"If we don't shoot it well, we have to destroy teams on the glass and win the turnover margin," FSU head coach Luke Loucks said. "And we didn't do that tonight. And the second thing, we fouled too much."
The Seminoles never found a rhythm from outside, going 0-for-9 from three in the first half and opening the game 12-of-31 from the field overall before finishing at 44% from the floor. Their first made three came early in the second half, when Shon Abaev knocked down a corner shot with 18:03 left. It didn’t spark a perimeter surge, and FSU had to lean harder into attacking the paint.
That’s where Anthony Robinson and Sebastian Rancik kept the Seminoles alive. Robinson scored 11 first-half points and ended with 19, while Rancik led FSU with 23 points and scored nine of the team’s final 17.
Florida State also got a few defensive stands that briefly kept the game within reach, and those stops led to a pair of fast-break dunks - one by Kam Taylor and another emphatic finish from Elisee Assui over Isaiah Brown.
But Florida had just enough answers whenever the Seminoles threatened to close the gap. Urban Klavzar delivered the biggest punch, scoring eight straight points in a little more than a minute, from 6:15 to 5:05, to keep the Gators comfortably in front.
"If you make three mental errors in a row and you let the number one team score eight points in a row in the same action, you're going to be in trouble... I should have called a timeout after the first time," Loucks said.
"I definitely should have called a timeout after the second one, and I didn't. And I thought that cost us in that moment."
Florida’s free-throw shooting helped widen the margin late. The Gators went 27-of-33 at the line in the second half after starting 3-of-8 in the first, and they finished 30-of-41 overall from the stripe. FSU was 14-of-18.
Even as Florida struggled to separate with its field goal shooting, the Gators still found ways to keep control. After the 10-minute mark, they made only two field goals, but they scored 25 points at the free-throw line on 29 attempts. Loucks said the Seminoles had already put Florida on the line too often before they began fouling intentionally to stay close.
"I think they had 27 free throws at the time we started fouling to keep it close," Loucks said. "With the time left, that's too many fouls... they didn't end up shooting it great from the foul line.
But what it does is slow the game down. We only had four fastbreak points."
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