February 04, 2012 – The No. 12 Florida Gators knew they would have a tough game when they hosted the No. 25 Vanderbilt Commodores but they held on for their seventh straight win on Saturday, knocking off Vanderbilt, 73-65.
Kenny Boynton finished with 18 points and Bradley Beal scored 16 to help Florida take the win. Both players were big in the second half, Beal scoring 14 points after halftime and Boynton draining a three with 1:10 remaining and then sinking two charity shots with 25.9 seconds left to seal Florida's victory.
Vanderbilt’s biggest problem was mistakes as they committed 17 turnovers, mostly against double teams. Jeffery Taylor led the Commodores with 25 points while John Jenkins, the SEC's leading scorer, added 15, but it was not enough to overcome the mistakes.
“We did a really poor job at handling the pressure,” Taylor said after the game. “We had a lot of turnovers that resulted in easy points for them. We played really hard and competed, but they just made more shots than we did.”
The Commodores committed five turnovers in the first five minutes of the game and eight overall in the first 16 minutes, most of them against Florida's trapping press.
“They’re a good team. I thought they ran their offense well and really shot it in,” said Vanderbilt head coach Kevin Stallings. We didn’t do a very good job of attacking their press and it was disruptive. We did a poor job with our spacing and our ball handling and it caused problems.”
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