Florida coach Todd Golden is happy to focus on basketball while putting sexual misconduct accusations behind him.
The university cleared Golden on Monday after a four-month Title IX investigation in which he was accused of stalking, sexual exploitation and sexual harassment, including sending unwanted photos and videos of his genitalia.
Florida said it didn’t uncover any evidence against Golden in its investigation.
“Happy to put it behind us,” Golden said during a Thursday press conference to advance Saturday’s game at Tennessee. “Moving forward, we’ll continue to have our full attention on our team and then the game on Saturday. Look forward to talking about basketball with you guys.”
While nearly all the questions were about on-court stuff, Golden was asked how he goes about repairing his reputation after highly public accusations that rocked the Gainesville campus.
“To be honest, it’s a very fair and real question,” the 39-year-old Golden said. “I’m simply not worried about that right now, you know, my job is to make sure our team’s prepared, my job’s to make sure we’re ready to go for Saturday. I’ll worry about all that stuff later.”
The complainants in the Title IX case still can appeal the university’s decision.
Golden’s work on the court has been fine despite the distractions.
The Gators (18-2, 5-2 Southeastern Conference) are ranked No. 5 in the nation. Florida had a mid-week bye this week and hasn’t played since routing Georgia 89-59 last Saturday.
“This was the perfect week for us to get a bye,” Golden said. “I would have been a little concerned if we would have played Tuesday or Wednesday, how much we would have been able to rally from a mental and physical preparation standpoint. But it’s been good to us.
“We took Monday relatively off, we practiced really hard Tuesday. Took Wednesday off. We should be pretty fresh going into Saturday and we should have everybody ready to go.”
–Field Level Media
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