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
It was actually advanced stats. For some reason there was split between looked like a relatively tough UF schedule to the eye, and what happened when you added up the algorithmic ratings of opponents for all sec teams. Everyone in the SEC had to play tough teams. I don’t have access to the comprehensive ratings, but I’ll just choose Ole Miss as a random comparison. Both teams played 11 Q1 games in conference. Here were the 6 Q1 games the teams had in common (with NET ratings): at 2 Auburn vs 5 Tenn at 6 Bama vs 13 TAMU at 34 MSU at 40 Arky We can also pair up two of the unique games, as they were recipricol matchups: ……UF……….OM @14 UK..@16 Miz v16 Miz..v14 UK So that leaves only 3 unequal games to compare: ……UF………..OM @5 UT…....@4 UF v28 OM…..v2 Aub @33 Uga…@48 Van While neither of these trios is easy, Im guessing that all of us would accept the trip to Uga to avoid UF and Auburn here, making Ole Miss’ the harder path.
Correct. As much fun as it is to feed a persecution complex, math don't lie. The Athletic had a roundup (IIRC) going into the last few weeks of conference season. Florida had one of the easiest up to that point, and one of the easiest from that point.
Overall we had an easy path when you consider that we had a lot of home games against bottom feeders. Almost "gimme" games but close to that if we played them away as well. If you just look at the top of the league where the real games that mattered were played we had a very tough schedule last year. Or do we get dinged for not playing Florida?
IDGAD about metrics. Give me another sec team that played UK, Auburn, Bama, Arkansas and UT all on the road without à return home game except UTenn.
