By: Eric Fawcett -- June 19, 2025 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. Takeaways From Florida’s SEC Opponent Announcement | GatorCountry.com
I take exception to the claim that UF had one of the easier SEC schedules last season. There were five very good teams in the SEC: UF, UTn, Auburn, UK and Bama. We played Auburn, UK and Bama on the road without a return game. The only home and home was UTn. And if you throw Arky into the mix we played them on the road without a return game. We had a schedule very much biased against us with home and away.
I love Florida's 2026 SEC schedule! It looks like almost all of the marquee SEC games will be in the O'Connell Center! According to Tarvik's Rankings,2025-26 Projections - - Customizable College Basketball Tempo Free Stats - T-Rank Home: Arkansas(10), Alabama(19), Auburn(32); Tennessee(12), LSU(67), Miss St(39); (H/A): Kentucky(13), Georgia(33), South Carolina(105) Away: Missouri(25), Oklahoma(30), Ole Miss(48); Texas(35), Texas AM(36), Vanderbilt(22); (H/A): Georgia(33), South Carolina(105), Kentucky(13)
Florida had played tough competition before. For instance in the 1987-88 season (a trip down memory lane), Florida played the following high profile teams after their very first NCAA Tournament season: 1987-88 Florida Gators Men's Schedule and Results | College Basketball at Sports-Reference.com #18 Georgia Tech Iowa ST Seton Hall SMU Florida ST Ohio St #9 Duke Michigan ST at #3 Pittsburgh Freshman Livingstone Chatman had a great debut against the Rambling Wreck from Georgia Tech! Florida had also won the Pre-season NIT in 1988 for the first time (& won it again in the 2005-06 season). In the late 80s, the following teams had made the Final Four: Duke ('86, '88, '89, '90,..) Seton Hall('89) Georgia Tech ('90,..)
It's the pukin media pundits. They picked against UF almost all the time last year. So what does that mean? It means tough games for them to win it. UF were the underdog in those games, especially the road games. Then they turn around and say they had an easy schedule. LOL
