SAN ANTONIO, Texas — They call this time of year in college basketball March Madness, and for Gators assistant coaches John Andrzejek and Kevin Hovde, the moniker is as fitting as the reception they received from a Mariachi band when the Gators touched down here late Wednesday afternoon.

Florida’s run to the Final Four has included four victories, a cross-country regional – and two significant coaching announcements.

First, on March 20, Campbell University announced the hire of 32-year-old Andrzejek as its next head coach. Four days later, Columbia University announced that 36-year-old Hovde would be its next head coach.

As Andrzejek (defensive coordinator) and Hovde (offensive coordinator) spend their final week with the Gators, they are working overtime, with an eye toward the future but invested in the present, both trying to close their UF chapters with a national championship.

“I’ll be fine,” Hovde said of the double duty and compartmentalizing. “The reality is, I feel very fortunate and happy to be in this position. It’s all great things. And, you know, we just want to make sure that we give everything we have to finish out this season with the Gators. What we’re doing here is pretty special.”

Andrzejek has regained his breath following a couple of whirlwind days last month in Raleigh, N.C., where the Gators opened their run to the Final Four with victories over Norfolk State and defending national champion Connecticut. Campbell, located in Buies Creek, N.C., about 30 miles south of Raleigh, sent a media team to record an introductory video and gather content to amplify Andrzejek’s hiring the day before Florida’s NCAA Tournament opener against Norfolk State. He fulfilled the requests amid game-planning for what turned out to be a 26-point win over the Spartans.

Andrzejek had to put his smartphone away as hundreds of texts and dozens of calls from well-wishers poured in.

“It’s been crazy,” he said. “When that stuff was going on, that was sort of the height of the discombobulation. It’s definitely two full-time jobs, but I’ve really tried to stay locked in with the Gators and make sure we’re doing everything we can to guard these teams as well as possible.”

Adding to a stretch that both coaches will remember the rest of their lives, they returned with head coach Todd Golden to familiar territory last week when the Gators defeated Maryland and Texas Tech in San Francisco to advance to the program’s first Final Four in 11 years. The Gators practiced at the University of San Francisco, where Golden spent the previous three seasons as head coach before taking over the Gators in 2022.

Hovde spent five seasons with Golden at San Francisco, and during the 2016-17 season, Golden was an associate head coach under then-USF coach Kyle Smith, Hovde an assistant, and Andrzejek, the team’s director of basketball operations.

Golden is thrilled to see Hovde and Andrzejek have an opportunity to become head coaches for the first time and said he is promoting Jonathan Safir, Florida’s director of basketball strategy and analytics, to assistant coach to fill one of the spots. Meanwhile, Golden noted Hovde’s and Andrzejek’s fingerprints are all over Florida’s rise to prominence.

“Kevin obviously deserves a lot of credit for the success our program’s had. He’s been with us since day one here at Florida,” Golden said. “He’s been a big part of who we recruit and just how we build out our program on a day-to-day basis and has coordinated our offense. A guy that I think is going to become a great head coach.

“And then for John, really the same. He came here later and has done a really good job of building out the foundation of our defense and holding us to a higher standard on that side of the ball. Tireless worker, does a great job of raising the bar in terms of just basically the amount of time and effort he puts into our program. We’re going to miss those guys a lot.”

For more of the story, you only need to look at the numbers.

Florida’s offense averages 85.5 points per game and ranks second in the country in offensive efficiency a season after the Gators averaged a program-record 85.7 points a game under Hovde’s direction. Defensively, under Andrzejek’s tutelage, the Gators improved from 94th in the country a season ago to 10th this season. The turnaround, with a roster that included several returning players, didn’t happen by accident.

“I’ll admit, there were some rough days in the preseason,” Andrzejek said. “It was not always sunshine and flowers and Kumbaya. We definitely made it a priority as a program to coach them harder on the defensive end, hold them more accountable, and just ask them to devote more energy to that side of the ball.”

Andrzejek arrived at UF after Golden’s first season following a four-year stint as an assistant at Washington State, where Smith was head coach for five seasons before taking the Stanford job last year. In their time together at UF, Golden, Hovde, Andrzejek, and Gators assistant Carlin Hartman have relied on many of the same principles they used when working with Smith at Columbia. However, with technological advancements, a heavy reliance on analytics and their evolving systems, Florida’s staff has developed a reputation as playing “nerd ball.”

They take that as a compliment.

“It’s great,” Hovde said. “I mean, it all started back when we were all at Columbia together. We used advanced analytics and across every part of our program. Most programs are using it to an extent now, but I do think we were on the forefront of it.”

Andrzejek agreed. “It’s definitely a big part of our success,” he said. “We try to leverage data as much as possible to inform our decision making, whether that’s in the guys we recruit, the playing style that we play on both sides of the ball, some of the scouting decisions that we make, but it’s only a piece of the puzzle. There’s an old-school coaching component of it too, that is certainly really important.”

Hovde replaces Jim Engles at Columbia, who replaced Smith in 2016 without similar success. Coincidentally, Andrzejek earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Columbia, where he first encountered Golden and Hovde.

Hovde plans to take much of what he learned under Golden back to Columbia.

“How to run an organization, I think that’s where Todd’s incredible,” Hovde said. “He really operates like he’s a CEO. He’s a great delegator, just great at kind of having his fingerprints all over the program, but also allowing the staff to do their jobs. The second piece, I would say, is our experience here. I think it really helped me become even more confident in our program and our system and that it can work anywhere.”

It has worked so well that they are at the Final Four, two wins from “nerd ball” winning a national championship.

“It’s been the time of my life,” Andrzejek said. “I mean, it’s been awesome to kind of build the program up from a program that was coming off an NIT appearance, to now we’re in the Final Four, and we got as good a chance of anybody to go all the way and cut them down.”