By BILL KOSS
Florida Gators Basketball Color Analyst
March 7, 2011
For the last several months there has been plenty of room on the bandwagon, and those of you who have been tooting your horn for the Gators know that this team has given you a really fun ride to the SEC regular season championship.
Not that any of you are going to get a personalized SEC ring, but you can feel really connected to this team's success because you believed in the outcome and supported your Gators from the very beginning even though plenty of others kept finding reasons why Florida wouldn't get it done.
Fred Demarest has been the Florida basketball sports information director for the last nine years. His job is very demanding, and yet he has delivered a product to the media that has been second to none of his colleagues.
Demarest worked his last game for the Gators in Nashville, Tenn., Saturday night and left after the game for his new position in Indianapolis, where he will direct a national marketing program for the NCAA.
Fred will be missed by Donovan and his staff because not only was he a loyal and dedicated team member, but he loves basketball. He was there for national championships, conference championships and the resurrection of the Florida program these past four years.
He has championed the accomplishments of Billy Donovan and enjoyed a unique personal association with the Florida head man.
Demarest told me Monday morning that he believes what Donovan has done over the last four years is one of the truly great coaching jobs of all time in college basketball. He said it would be criminal if Donovan is not this year's SEC Coach of the Year, and that Chandler Parsons is the outright SEC Player of the Year.
Not John Jenkins or Brandon Knight or Jamychal Green or any of the other worthy candidates, but the versatile senior of the Gators.
Parsons has become the poster child for why most players should stay in school for four years. Parsons has always had the raw material to differentiate himself from others as a basketball player. He has dynamic athletic skills for a 6-foot-10 forward but, as bandwagon members know, he has fought through personal demons in the maturation process to become one of the nation's truly outstanding college players.
Parsons is among the top 10 SEC players in seven statistical categories and has averaged a team-high 33.6 minutes a game. He has seven double-doubles this season and fought through a leg injury in the stretch run which would have sidelined most other players. Florida would not have won this third ever outright SEC championship without the leadership of their prized senior.
By the way, not only has Donovan never been named the league's coach of the year, but Florida has never had the league's most valuable player in the history of the SEC.
So now the second leg of a four stage season is behind us. Florida came through the first stage, which is the non conference schedule, with signature wins over Florida State, Kansas State and Xavier, and in the second leg they marched to the conference title with six SEC road victories.
Neither of Florida's national championship teams had six SEC road wins, and the last team with that accomplishment was Florida's first-ever SEC title team in 1989. This is also only the fourth team in school history to win 24 or more regular-season games.
This week the bandwagon will be in Atlanta where Florida will be playing for its fourth-ever SEC tournament title. There are still some good seats on the wagon and this team will need a lot of support from here on out, so don't hesitate to hop aboard.
