All My Rowdy Friends

Without tent, nor tarp, nor canopy, nor umbrella, nor coat, Colin Boettcher slept in the 57-degree rain. It was his “mission,” as he put it, to make it into the O’Connell Center when the doors opened Saturday morning at 8:30 for ESPN’s College GameDay. Around 11 p.m. the night before, he walked to the edge of Butler Plaza to buy Chex Mix at a “sketchy gas station.” He stopped by his apartment on the way back to grab his alien onesie and a bottle of Mahogany Teakwood body spray his mom bought him in sixth grade. He only started wearing it recently to “pick up ladies,” and he playfully joked that he’d been unsuccessful so far. 

But, no matter. He had a mission. 

So he slept, or, maybe, rested, or, maybe, closed his eyes. He was red and running a sizable fever when he woke at 5 a.m., and by then, there were nearly 500 students — UF’s Rowdy Reptiles, as they’re known — who’d joined him outside the O’Dome in a line that stretches well down Stadium Drive. The night in a lawn chair? Well worth it. 

“You have to fight for a chance to get into this place,” Boettcher murmured drowsily, sometime between 3 and sunrise. “This is what happens when you’re a basketball school.”

The University of Florida has experienced something over the past few years many colleges never do. A rebirth, in a way. After two decades of inconsistency on the court, the Gators rapidly lifted themselves to the top of the sport last season. Passage of time at work, and it's March again. Florida’s preparing for another NCAA tournament run, rising to No. 5 in this week’s AP Top 25 Poll and squarely in the mix for a No. 2 seed, if not the final No. 1. 

And the crowds? The support? Well, it has never been greater. 

“We have the best home-court advantage in college basketball,” Florida head coach Todd Golden said on the court during the Gators’ SEC regular-season championship celebration after throttling No. 20 Arkansas on Saturday. Boettcher, the color of a ghost, stood in the second row of the student section smiling through the entire presentation.

“I didn’t come here for the basketball,” the 20-year-old Minnesota man said. “I actually thought this place was known for football. But, man, winning changes everything.

"It changed the energy of this campus.”

A brief refresher: Florida was once a football school, as is the required character of the SEC, and a floundering one since its last championship in 2008. Back then, it doubled as a basketball power, and the Gators won two championships in each sport, including a pair in the span of three months in 2007. There has never been a comparable stretch of dominance.

Yet that all dissipated, and Florida football was as up-and-down for the last 15 years as its counterpart across Gale Lemerand Drive. It’s still searching for answers, on its fourth coach in the past decade, and it’s possible this whole ordeal — the lines, the basketball atmosphere, the passion that makes someone sleep in the rain — owes something to the swamp not being The Swamp. 

Under the tutelage of Golden, one of the sport's rising-star head coaches at the still-young age of 40, Gators basketball leaped into the national frame in his first three years on the job. It filled a void of emotion. 

“This student body needs something to care about,” says Tristan Bukow. He’s the president of Florida’s official student fan group, the Rowdy Reptiles. It has more than 13,000 followers on Instagram, and operates a GroupMe with 1,881 members. There, it organizes student ticketing for games. “When [basketball] got good, these students were always going to flock to it. They were going to games when the teams were bad.”

From 2017 to 2022, which was Golden’s first year, Florida never won more than 21 games in a season. The crowds it drew were still strong, especially in the years before the COVID-19 pandemic. But the O’Dome was rarely packed, despite Florida beating at least one ranked team at home in all but one year during that stretch. Rays snuck through, beacons of interest bubbling just below the surface. No true pulse, though.

Since Florida picked up this new hobby of excellence, as Boettcher said, it's become so difficult to get tickets that students take extraordinary measures to earn them. The Rowdy Reptiles control the side of the lower bowl opposite the teams’ benches, the most prized seat for any student hoping to attend. The first 500 people in line on gameday get wristbands and are locked in. The rest head to the 200 level, where multiple sections stood for the entirety of the game. One note: the wristbands start coming out as early as two days before a game. 

In anticipation of UF’s Saturday night showdown against John Calipari's Arkansas Razorbacks, fans starting setting up Thursday around 2 p.m. outside the student-entry gate more than four hours before tip off of the Florida women’s basketball game  The rules are that any group of students has to have at least half of its posse in its spot in the line at any given moment. Bukow and others perform unannounced checks, and if the numbers aren’t in order, you’re heading to the back of the line. 

When No. 6 Florida faced No. 1 Tennessee last January — essentially the starting gun for this sprint — rules were scarce. They’re widely accepted now, and camping out has become more of a pastime, with folks playing cards, watching other games on computers and studying in groups for the tests they definitely aren’t missing. It’s a bonding experience, and a sort of UF student “rite of passage” to become a true Rowdy (someone that attends at least 3-5 games in the lower bowl each year). 

“It’s intense,” UF student Isaac Clark said Friday. “I’ll be sleeping in a wet sleeping bag. I’m not going to be happy about it, but I’ll do it to get up there.”

To no surprise, college students do crazy things, and this type of behavior isn’t abnormal. The most celebrated example comes at Duke, where winning in basketball is almost baked into the $90,000 yearly cost of tuition. For its annual home game against rival North Carolina, fans set up tents in a maze known as Krzyzewskiville (K-Ville, for short), named after the Blue Devils’ longtime Hall of Fame coach, Mike Krzyzewski. The students remain there for months before a given game, passing Duke basketball trivia tests that determine their spot in line, based on how much they know about the team. Similar to Florida, there are midnight line checks, all for a chance at a seat in the 9,314-seat Cameron Indoor Stadium. The night before the game last year, roll call occurred at 1:15, 2:30, 3:43 and 5 a.m. 

So Duke is on a whole ‘nother level, but that hysteria is a guiding light at Florida.

“Of course, we want this to be an experience,” Bukow said. “If the students are that interested, and they’ve shown they are, then why can’t we make this what other schools have.

“We could be Duke.”

That’s more of an argument than a statement. Certain factors continue to hold Florida back from reaching that form of sport superiority in all facets, even if the product on the court has. 

Over the past few weeks, those hoping to score student tickets were no longer allowed to camp in tents. With heavy rain Friday night, some tied tarps to the fences around the line. After a few hours, officials came out and began removing those, saying they couldn’t be attached to any property. Authorities encouraged fans to go home due to the weather, and some did, but most were back within hours. Those who stayed were left with lawn chairs, sleeping bags and cement pillowcases as they fought through the storm. 

It doesn’t sit well with students, and, by all accounts, each time tents and coverings have been confiscated, there’s been little explanation as to why they aren’t allowed, especially given they were last year. The answer: UF’s building code states that any tent requires a temporary building permit application and a flame-retardant certificate. The time it takes to obtain either ranges, but a source close to the program said the rule is intended to prevent anyone from abruptly moving onto UF’s campus or protesters from camping. If those seem like rules other schools would follow, though, it's because they do. Duke has nearly identical language in its building code, yet it makes specific exceptions for basketball camping.

“There’s no way the University of Florida will ever be able to be considered an elite culture for basketball if they treat us like this,” Clark said, though most students don’t entirely understand – or agree with – the rationale behind UF’s prohibited items list.

“We just feel a little hamstrung by some of these things,” Bukow said. “Obviously, the team wants the best environment it can get. The coaches do. The fans do, too. So it can be a little demoralizing.”

The effort is still there. GameDay was at capacity in the student section, and when one of those midnight soldiers hit a half-court shot to win $19,000, the O’Dome exploded in a way few other venues can. Minutes later, the panel picked a sweep of the evening’s contest: Florida. The arena let out another boom. “It’s an amazing fanbase,” ESPN analyst Seth Greenberg said, and his thoughts translated to the game, as well. 

As is necessary to be a “basketball school,” Florida has its chants. First, the weekly contenders like “left-right-left-right” (a nod to an opposing player’s steps walking off the court after fouling out) and “You can’t do that!” (with obvious usage). However, the Gators have grown more creative of late. Against Alabama, as the Charles Bediako eligibility saga neared its crest, the student section provided the designation “G-League Dropout.” Against the Razorbacks, when Arkansas forward Nick Pringle missed two sets of free throws in the second half, the arena shouted that it actually wanted Pringle to check back in. 

These things don’t go unnoticed. 

“It was a great atmosphere," Calipari said. "Students were in the rain, parked outside. I made sure my team saw it like this is you coming to town. This is what it's supposed to be like.” 

While Calipari appreciated the fans’ perseverance despite the downpour outside, the fans’ deluge inside wasn’t as fun. The opposing coach’s final verdict: “I wish it would have gone faster.”

“That means we’re doing our job,” Bukow said through a laugh, explaining that the fan support may be why Florida actually is a basketball school. It isn’t a “blue blood,” per se, but it's acting like one. The list of teams that’ve made it to five Final Fours and won three national championships this century is short. The atmosphere is a part of that.

Three days after throttling Arkansas, Golden earned his 100th career victory in a 108-74 beatdown of Mississippi State on Tuesday, Florida's second consecutive night scoring at least 105 and winning by 30. Pre-integration: the last time that's happened.

In blowouts of that sort, Florida frequently sends in its 7-foot-9 bench project, Olivier Rioux, to the roar of its student section. But the Gators have won every game by nine or more since their last loss to Auburn on Jan. 24. Rioux's getting his cardio. So against the Bulldogs, fans revised their requests.

"WE WANT COO-PER!" chants dripped from those standing 200-level sections, a nod to Florida's walk-on guard, Cooper Josefsberg, who'd played in only one game this season and had never scored in three years. Golden nodded, the fans erupted, and seconds later, Josefsberg drained a 3. By that point, assistant coach Carlin Hartman was crowd surfing the Gators' bench, and the student section was the loudest it'd been this season.

"It was really neat," Golden said between complaints about the players messing his hear up. "Beautiful shot."

And none of this, as they say, happens in a vacuum. The Gators’ coaching staff, in recognition of Bukow’s efforts, flew him to a game this year. The Rowdies have even begun working with the UAA, and they know “there are steps [they] can take toward the middle,” which might be how Florida actually gets this mythical coronation into basketball hierarchy.

Surely, it won’t change the current environment. 

Boettcher, who ended up coming down with something akin to the flu, has a secret he was trying to keep from the crowds while in his “Toy Story” getup: he’s actually a Santa Fe student. Technically, he can’t even be a Rowdy. This whole deal? He’s just around because it looks fun. 

“I left [Minnesota] for here, for the weather, honestly,” he said. “But when I saw what was going on here in Florida, I couldn’t miss this. You only get so many of these years where you can do fun stuff like this without worrying about other stuff.

“Camping out for a college basketball game, singing in the rain with your friends, missing classes, playing Pokemon, getting sick — all to support a really good basketball team? That’s what someone should be doing in college.”

And the Gators might just be better because of it.