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Even though the current basketball season is not over for the Billy Donovan's Gators, I can't wait to see what happens with this team next year, given what has transpired over the course of this season.

I wish I could fast forward now to the start of drills when more bodies will be added from a very good freshman class that could provide some competition to the kids that return. I wish I could see what the current freshmen learned from a sometimes difficult first year, and I want to see how much work they put into the off season in the weight room and in improving their individual games.

Obviously, we cannot change time, so we'll have to settle for what lessons this year's team will learn after a 3-8 record to close the year combined with a perplexing first round loss in the SEC Tournament doomed it to the NIT.

I know some of you are going to think back to the start of the season, when we all speculated that, given the youth of the team and the talent that was lost, if the Gators finished at or near .500 in the SEC and somehow snuck into the NCAA Tournament that it would be a good year.

However, as a season takes shape, we start to judge, to be critical, because we can all see how a team is playing right before our eyes. And, through my eyes there are a lot of things this team had better start to learn if it wants to get better.

A lot.

I know some of you will think I am being too critical of a young team that was competing against some veteran teams in the SEC like Tennessee, Arkansas, and Mississippi State. And, there is no denying those teams are loaded with veteran and good players.

That said, it was somewhat frustrating to watch this team play down the stretch, and I wasn't the only one who seemed to be pretty frustrated too.

Some guy named Billy Donovan wasn't exactly happy with his team, especially down the stretch, and that frustration finally boiled over in the SEC Tournament and in his comments after the game.

"It's in front of our guys, what it takes to win," Donovan said. "Like I said, for whatever reason I haven't brought it out in them, they're not committed to it, but I'm not necessarily really that excited about these guys being sophomores to be honest, I don't see that being a fit. I think people's initial thing is well they're going to get older, I don't believe in that."

Ouch. And there's more.

" I think our deficiencies so to speak that have affected our team are exposed and I have not been able to as a coach to get them to focus on it, improve it, and make it better, or buy into it, or whatever words you want to use," Donovan added.

There have been some fans who have been openly critical of Donovan for publicly chastising his team in this way but those who do this don't get it. Whether young or not, a team that continually seems to lack mental preparation, that consistently lacks defensive intensity,and that according to one honest team member, was not ready to play in the first game of the SEC Tournament when so much was on the line, deserves to be called out. Sometimes, players must be held accountable too.

I know it is the job of the coaching staff to get these things done, but at times a staff can only do so much and it becomes the team that has to decide how good it wants to be. In my view, this is squarely where this group sits right now.

There are obvious areas this team needs to get better at, starting at the defensive end of the floor. In SEC games, Florida is next to last in defense, giving up a whopping 75 points a game. It is next to last in field goal percentage defense, allowing the opposition to shoot 47 percent from the field. And, from the arc, where three point shooters have made a living against Florida, the Gators are 10th in the league, allowing opponents to shoot 37 percent from long distance.

More frustrating though are the intangibles; why does it take the team so long to get into a game after embarrassing starts to games? Why hasn't the defensive effort improved? Why are individual starting players being yanked from games so late in the season because of a lack of effort and intensity?

Young team or not, you earn your way, and in the days leading up to the Gators playing in the NIT, after the loss in the SEC Tournament, the players were kept out of the comforts of the Gator practice complex; the thought process being they didn't deserve to practice there given their recent effort. They practiced in the old Florida Gym; some of the players didn't even know where that was on campus.

They know now.

Look, I am not discounting how young this team is and I understand it must go through the learning curve and the "process" that Billy Donovan has talked about all season long. However, it is also evident to the head coach that just because a team will get a year older it doesn't mean that all of its problems will simply melt away because of that fact; age alone does not make a team better.

That's why I can't wait until next year to see what this group will learn from what happened this year. Will the team think it will be better simply because it is a year older or will it truly buy into what the coaching staff is preaching and understand that it will also take hard work and effort to take the team to the next level?

Maybe that learning process can start with a long run in the NIT. It's not too early to start that learning process.