Gators basketball to have 2 SEC games on ABC
When you’re the defending national champs, you get coveted TV slots. And that’s the case with the Florida Gators basketball team.
UF announced via release Wednesday that Florida has been chosen for two ESPN on ABC games during the upcoming 2025-26 regular season. Those games are:
—Florida vs. Alabama on Sunday, Feb. 1, at 1 p.m. ET.
—Florida vs. Kentucky on Saturday, Feb. 14, at 3 p.m. ET.
Both are home games.
ABC will air five games this regular season, and only Florida will make multiple network appearances.
2025-26 ESPN on ABC Men’s College Basketball Schedule
| Date | Time (ET) | Game | |||
| Sun, Feb 1 | 1 p.m. | No. 17 Alabama at No. 2 Florida | |||
| Sat, Feb 14 | 1 p.m. | No. 21 Kansas at No. 18 Iowa State | |||
| 3 p.m. | No. 9 Kentucky at No. 2 Florida | ||||
| Sat, Feb 21 | 1 p.m. | No. 25 North Carolina at Syracuse | |||
| 3 p.m. | No. 13 Arizona at No. 3 Houston |
The Gators are coming off a season in which they went 36–4 and won the program’s third national title. During the offseason, UF coach Todd Golden and his staff had the difficult challenge of replacing four departed guards from last season’s squad: All-American point guard Walter Clayton, starters Alijah Martin and Will Richard, and backup Denzel Aberdeen.
But the Gators appear to have found strong replacements in transfer guards Boogie Fland [Arkansas], Xavian Lee [Princeton] and AJ Brown [Ohio]. Meanwhile, UF returns valuable post players Thomas Haugh, Alex Condon, Rueben Chinyelu, and Micah Handlogten. Haugh, a power-forward last season, will primarily play small-forward moving forward.
“I tell our staff all the time, this is a little bit of a new team,” Golden said recently on Inside College Basketball Now with John Rothstein. “We get a lot of great returners coming back. Especially our front court, I think, has a chance to be one of, if not the best front court in America.
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But bringing in Boogie, bringing in Xavian Lee, bringing in AJ. We have some good freshmen coming in. We want this to be a new experience for these guys, [yet] we’re going to lean on Tommy, Condo, Rueben and Micah, and those experiences we had last year for them to kind of lead us into this new opportunity. But this is going to be a new challenge for this group this year.”
Fland a rising sophomore listed at 6-foot-2 and 175 pounds, was On3’s No. 1 point guard in the class of 2024 out of Archbishop Stepinac in New York. At Arkansas last season, he averaged 13.5 points, 5.1 assists, and 3.2 rebounds in 21 games (18 starts). He shot 37.9 percent from the field and 34.0 percent from three, with just 1.4 turnovers per game—strong numbers for a freshman primary ball-handler.
Lee, a rising senior from Princeton, brings poise and polish. He averaged 16.9 points, 6.1 rebounds, and 5.5 assists, shooting 43.9 percent from the floor and 36.6 percent from three. His assist-to-turnover ratio stood at an impressive 2.5:1, and he knocked down 78.9 percent of his free throws.
“I’ve been really really impressed and really happy with both these guys [Fland and Lee],” Golden told Rothstein. “They come from different situations. Obviously Boogie played a big role on Arkansas’s team last year as a freshman an d took some lumps, but I felt like played some really good basketball. And now going into his sophomore year will be able to get his best foot forward after having experienced some of those ups and downs. He had a great camp for us this summer.
