Morning News: Florida Is Coming Together, Gonzaga Escapes West Virginia, Je'lon Hornbeak Hurt

Anyone want to guess what bet Willie Cauley-Stein lost?

As most of you know, Morning News took a day off yesterday since college basketball basically took a day off. We had some actual quality teams playing competitive opponents last night, so Morning News makes its joyous, triumphant return:

Florida Is Beginning To Come Together Florida really hasn't played that poorly this season. Depending on which computer rating you preferred, they were somewhere around the 15th best team in the country so far. But they've been doing it piecemeal, with so many missing pieces between injuries and suspensions. They don't have a full roster yet, but they're getting closer, and are even planning on getting back Chris Walker next week. This full roster is the one I thought had a good chance to win the SEC over Kentucky. The Wildcats are going to improve over the course of the year, but Florida is going to give them a run for the conference title and also potentially a 1 seed in March.

This game, basically, came down to the 16 turnovers Kansas had in the first half. They just looked like a mess for about ten minutes there, and dug themselves too big of a hole against a quality team. That led to typical ESPN/twitter overreaction about Kansas being too young and lacking leadership and lacking identity and blah, blah, blah. They must have aged a lot in the halftime locker room, because they nearly won this game. In fact, down by 6 with about a minute to go they suffered a horrible referee no-call that, if called a foul correctly, might have given them a real chance to win. This Kansas team isn't as good as they're going to look in March, but anybody who thinks they aren't already one of the ten or so best teams in the country is overreacting to small sample sizes.

Gonzaga Escapes West Virginia The fact is, Gonzaga is going to score points. They might be the most explosive offensive in the country. The problem for Gonzaga is that their defense isn't any good. And yes, I know that the media tells us every year that Gonzaga can't play defense against top level opponents, but this year it might actually be true. So far, Pomeroy rates this defense Gonzaga's worst in 7 seasons. And that bad defense allowed West Virginia to score a lot of points early in this game and put them on the brink of a massive victory. But then they started missing every jumper they saw, missing 8 in a row over a 5:30 stretch of game time. Kevin Pangos hit three consecutive three-pointers toward the tail end of that stretch to completely turn this game around.

This Gonzaga team had a much softer non-conference schedule than usual. This win and their win over Arkansas will be their two best wins before January. A game against Memphis is their final chance for a quality non-conference win. And this is something that couple ripple down through the whole conference, because if Gonzaga falls out of the Top 25 then that will harm the resumes of St. Mary's and BYU, both of whom are lacking for big wins as well. It might be very difficult for the WCC to somehow get three teams in the NCAA Tournament. Two teams might be the ceiling.

West Virginia has been a feisty, solid team, but they're just one piece short. All four of their games against Pomeroy Top 100 opponents have been competitive, but all have been lost. They're going to need to get to 10-8 in Big 12 play to make a run at an at-large bid, and I don't think they're good enough to pull that off.

Oklahoma's Je'lon Hornbeak Out 4-6 Weeks The Oklahoma guard broke his foot and will be out until mid-January at the earliest. Hornbeak isn't an All-Big 12 player by any stretch of the imagination, but he's part of what is basically a six man rotation, and this loss comes at a bad time. Missing the Kansas game doesn't really matter since they were probably going to lose that game anyway. I'd be more concerned about the Texas A&M (neutral), Louisiana Tech, Texas (road), Iowa State and Kansas State (road) games. As a team already sitting on the wrong side of the bubble, more than two losses in those five games could really blow any realistic at-large chances they had. It will be time for some players further down on the bench to step up for a few weeks.