Texas A&M entered its men’s basketball game down 1-0 Wednesday after being assessed a technical foul and a resulting free throw by Florida. The Aggies had forgotten their jerseys in a hotel room near the arena in Gainesville, Florida.
Due to the administrative technical foul, the Gators got a free throw, which they converted before the game tipped off. Aggies assistants, meanwhile, had to hit their accommodations to retrieve the jerseys.
Texas A&M coach Buzz Williams totally understood, recalling the old days. “I forgot the jerseys in my hotel room. That’s probably the right way to say it because I used to be a manager. If that would have happened, my head coach would have stuck up for me. You don’t want the jerseys to get wrinkled, so they hang them in my room, and I just forgot to put them on the bus,” he said after the game, according to The Associated Press.
“They don’t go back and put their jersey on until they’ve cleared the floor for the last time for the national anthem. That’s when they discovered, ’Coach, we don’t have anything to put on.’ I’ve never seen it before. We’ll probably never see it again,” Jimmy Dykes elaborated on the ESPNU broadcast, according to sports website Awful Announcing.
Administrative technical foul sure sounded foreign to Williams.
“This is maybe the 500th game I’ve coached as a head coach. Those officials were explaining to me that the league office called and said it was an administrative technical foul, which I had never heard,” Williams said after the game, according to the Gainesville Sun.
Florida coach Todd Golden agreed, having never dealt with walking out to an empty opposing bench in previous contests.
“I’m 37, I’ve played basketball my whole life and that’s never happened to me in any aspect or any point in my career. … It’s something that happened at my son’s [Catholic Youth Organization] game but usually not at the SEC level,” Golden said, according to AP.
The jersey mix-up did not impede the Aggies, who won 66-63.
• Brad Matthews can be reached at bmatthews@washingtontimes.com.
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