The SEC has come out with every team’s home and away opponents for the 2025-26 season, an announcement that has had increased importance after recent changes to the league.
With the SEC having established itself as the best league in college basketball last year you know there aren’t going to be many easy opportunities, but there is still some distance between the top teams and the bottom ones, and knowing exactly who you are going to play helps frame the schedule on the whole. Often in college basketball coverage a team’s non-conference strength of schedule is discussed, but that number lacks a lot of context. If a team is going to have a lot of hard opportunities in conference play they are going to be less likely to want to play challenging non-conference opponents, and while we’ve seen SEC non-conference announcements trickling out, seeing the league opponents now starts to allow a holistic view of a team’s schedule and what their possible resume could look like.
Perhaps the biggest reason why the matchup announcements mean so much is the fact that the SEC is now a 16-team league, and that means schedules can be extremely unbalanced with the possibility existing for teams to have drastically different levels of difficulty within the league. Florida benefited from this a year ago, with most analysis going into conference play suggesting the Gators had the easiest schedule in the league (of course, Florida was a top team who couldn’t play themselves–inherently meaning they have one less challenging game on the schedule than every other team), with a team like Alabama getting tough luck with a very challenging slate.
To find out where Florida might land on that spectrum, let’s take a look at their 2025-26 SEC matchups (dates and times to be determined–and of course this also plays an important role in how challenging a schedule will be).
Home Only
Alabama
Arkansas
Auburn
LSU
Mississippi State
Tennessee
Road Only
Ole Miss
Missouri
Oklahoma
Texas
Texas A&M
Vanderbilt
Home And Away
Georgia
Kentucky
South Carolina
Let’s first talk about the home opportunities.
Going into the season it’s likely that the Gators will be picked to finish first in the SEC, and right behind them is likely to be Tennessee who is returning a bunch of talent that is being supplemented by an excellent portal and high school recruiting class. Alabama is also expected to be in the top four of five with the unexpected return of Lebaron Philon. With that being the case, it looks like the Gators may have caught a break having two of the other top projected teams in the league coming to Gainesville. Arkansas does have talent on paper, Auburn’s roster has taken a definite step back from last season in terms of talent, Mississippi State looks like a middle of the pack team, and LSU is once again fighting for relevance so those games might not have a ton of juice–so the key games here are certainly Tennessee and Alabama.
Because the Gators are getting two of the other top teams in the league at home only, it inherently means they don’t have as many challenging opponents to see on the road. If you were to look at the Barttorvik projections for the league right now, the highest ranking team the Gators see on the road is only sixth (I’ll let you look for yourself if you want to find out which team that is–it will surprise you!) so, once again–it looks like the Gators may have caught a break.
To begin talking about the home and away opponents, you have to start with the story that public pressure sometimes works. What do I mean? Well, if you remember last year, for the first time in a number of years the SEC didn’t match up Florida and Kentucky in a home and road matchup–they only played once. Well, fans made their voices heard, to the point where not only the SEC put the matchup back in place, but there were members of the SEC offices that went to social media to say that they heard call outs from fans and knew they needed to restore the home and away matchup.
We also see that Georgia and South Carolina remain Florida’s every year home and away opponents which certainly aren’t games that people will be particularly fired up to see–but it offers the Gators a chance to get some wins against two teams that aren’t projected to contend at the top of the league.
Overall, the Gators were treated like an SEC and NCAA Tournament Champion. They were given some favorable matchups at home on the road, and were restored to playing two games against one of the biggest brands in the sport. We will now wait on seeing the order in which these games will take place to see how that could affect Florida’s performance.