The obituary of No. 14 Florida’s race to repeat as men’s basketball national champions was widely written Jan. 3, when the Gators lost in ugly fashion to Missouri to open SEC play. The holes were obvious: shaky point guard play, poor shooting, limited bench production. The Gators looked very far away from the top contenders in the sport and at 9–5 looked poised for a potentially disappointing 2025–26 season.
Six weeks later, back-to-back national championships don’t look so outlandish.
Winners of 10 out of 11 after handling No. 25 Kentucky on Saturday, Florida looks every bit the part of one of the elite teams in the sport. The SEC race is fully in the Gators’ control (the showdown with Arkansas on Feb. 28 as the potential decider, but Florida has a game edge already). A top two- or three-seed seems well on its way. The Gators’ overall efficiency margin this season is higher than it was at this point last season. We’ll see how the Gators finish, but as things stand now Todd Golden’s team is on track to enter March Madness well-positioned to make a serious run at a repeat.
How have they done it? Boogie Fland and Xaivian Lee didn’t turn into Walter Clayton Jr. and Alijah Martin overnight after a bumpy first two months. Instead, the Gators have refined their identity into a fast, absurdly physical team that wears on teams in games. Score, and Fland is flying back at you the other way with sights set on stealing two in transition. Forcing a Gators miss is only an invitation to head to the battlefield of the backboards, and Florida has more size, more physicality and more athleticism in its frontcourt than just about anyone. The Gators earn so many of their backbreaking buckets off sheer strength and hustle, not elite X’s and O’s prowess or skill. And it only gets harder to avoid them as games get later, teams get more banged up, and moments get bigger.
That moment came midway through the second half in Saturday’s 92–83 win. Kentucky had done a good job keeping Florida to one shot most of the way. Then, in a less than six-minute stretch from the 12:39 mark to the 7:17 mark, the Wildcats gave up 10 offensive rebounds. It was a five-point game when a Rueben Chinyelu putback started that stretch … by the end of it, the Gator lead was 15.
Golden and his staff are regarded as something of analytics revolutionaries in the sport, and when you think of that you likely envision throwing up threes at high rates or eschewing the midrange. But sometimes the math problem is a simple one: generate more possessions, take more shots than the other team. And it’s that math that the Gators have essentially broken this season with the jumbo-sized lineups and rebounding dominance, essentially an analytically friendly version of Roy Williams’s best North Carolina teams or other old-school, big-and-fast ball clubs that rebounded and ran their way to wins.
Statistically, Florida’s combined offensive and defensive rebounding rate is the best on record in the KenPom database. Chinyelu is the star of that show, and even though his style of play may not earn him the March fame that Clayton got, his impact on the game is worthy of serious SEC Player of the Year consideration. He might split votes with Thomas Haugh, the Gators’ leading scorer and projected lottery pick, and Alex Condon, the team’s preseason first-team All-American. Together, that trio may be the sport’s most deadly, and Florida’s system built around their strengths is clicking on all cylinders.
Conventional thinking is that a team that shoots the three as poorly as Florida, which ranks in the bottom 25 nationally from distance, is highly unlikely to win a national championship. But the calculus on the Gators’ shoddy shooting changes with their offensive rebounding prowess. Essentially, it matters a whole lot less if you shoot 29.5% from three (the Gators’ current mark) vs. 35.6% (what Florida’s sharp-shooting bunch shot last season) when you get back over 40% of your misses on the offensive glass … often in prime positions to score. With the way Florida rebounds, there’s almost no such thing as a bad shot: Get it on the rim, and tell Chinyelu, Condon and the rest of this multiheaded rebounding monster to go get it. The only bad possession for Florida is a turnover, and among the biggest reasons for the turnaround in Gainesville, Fla., this season after the slower start is they’ve started taking care of the ball better. Fland has just one game with more than two turnovers in his last 10, Lee had gone three games without a giveaway before committing two vs. Kentucky and reserve spark plug guard Urban Klavzar is also very surehanded.
And when the Gators do make threes, like they did Saturday? Watch out.
“When we hit 10 threes, I don’t think anyone in the country can play with us,” Condon said.
The numbers back Condon up. When Florida shoots better than 28% from three this season, the Gators are 11–0. Florida’s average margin of victory in those games? 23.1 points. The only team to truly take Florida the distance on a good shooting day was Vanderbilt in mid-January, and that took Vandy winning the turnover battle by six.
Florida will likely need more than a couple of those average-or-better shooting days in March if it wants a real chance of defending its title on the first Monday of April. But the Gators are also one of the few teams that wouldn’t need an outlier shooting day to keep up with the brute force and physicality of an Arizona, Michigan or Houston in a Final Four game.
The recipe for the Gators is clear, and few in the SEC have proven they can stop it. And that second-half tidal wave Saturday in one of Florida’s biggest league wins yet is the latest example of why they have a very real chance of pulling off a second straight title run.
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