By DAVE SKRETTA AP Basketball Writer
Florida will start the men’s college basketball season where it ended it two seasons ago: No. 1.
The Gators were the overwhelming pick to top the preseason AP Top 25 on Monday, receiving 47 of the 59 first-place votes from a panel of national media. It is the first time that coach Todd Golden’s bunch has resided on top since the final poll in 2025, after they had beaten Houston to deliver the school its third national championship.
“It’s cool,” Golden said of the ranking, “but like, we’ve been No. 1 before. We won a national championship before. That’s what I want our program to expect. That’s what we want to kind of go into every season at.”
Duke received 10 first-place votes and was second in the preseason poll. Illinois received the other two and was third.
The Gators started last season at No. 3 but crashed out of the poll entirely by early January. They rallied to win the Southeastern Conference regular-season championship, only to get stunned by Iowa as a No. 1 seed in the second round of the NCAA Tournament.
“I think we’re more prepared this year for early-season expectations than we were last year,” Golden said. “We were kind of gathering ourselves, figuring (things) out for the first time, where this year we can use last year’s experience to learn from.”
In an era of roster upheaval — some teams still don’t know who will be eligible as court cases play out — the Gators have the benefit of experience on their side. Thomas Haugh, Alex Condon, Rueben Chinyelu and Denzel Aberdeen all played on their national title team.
Aberdeen, back after a year at Kentucky, is among the players who’ve been granted another season of eligibility by the courts.
“We didn’t finish the way that we wanted to last year, so everyone’s kind of got that in the back of their head as motivation,” Condon said. “Times where we’re struggling in conditioning at 6 a.m., we just went back to that, and I feel like we’ve talked about it a few times with the core group, how motivating it is the fact that we fell short.”
The head of the class
The Blue Devils matched their highest preseason ranking since they were No. 1 in 2017, though coach Jon Scheyer is well aware that where they end up is what matters. Duke has won 70 games over the past two seasons, a school record for such a stretch, but losses to UConn in the Elite Eight and Houston in the Final Four have left a sting on Tobacco Road.
“I feel like any time I step on the court, I believe me and my teammates are going to win,” said Dame Sarr, who along with Caleb Foster, Patrick Ngongba II and Cayden Boozer give Duke a talented returning nucleus to go with its top-tier recruiting class.
“I feel like we have a chance to win a national championship,” Sarr said. “It’s just doing a better job this year.”
Illinois matched its best preseason ranking since 2001, and returns five of its top eight scorers — headlined by Andrej Stojakovic and David Mirkovic — from a team that made its first Final Four appearance in two decades last season.
UConn and Arizona, each coming off a Final Four trip of their own, rounded out the top five of the preseason poll.
The rest of the rankings
Michigan State, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia and Houston finished out the first 10, while Louisville, Arkansas, St. John’s, Miami and Gonzaga were next. Michigan, Kansas, Iowa State, Texas Tech and Alabama rounded out the top 20, while the final five in the Top 25 were USC, UCLA, Kentucky, Vanderbilt and BYU.
The Jayhawks feature the nation’s No. 1 recruit, Tyran Stokes, a year after Darryn Peterson brought the same billing to Lawrence for a frustrating season that ended with another first-weekend NCAA tourney exit. The late addition of all-Big Ten forward Trey Kaufman-Renn, a transfer from Purdue, coupled with the return of Tre White and Melvin Council III thanks to court decisions, could change those fortunes come March.
Kentucky is making its 998th appearance in the poll. Two more weeks and it will be the first to reach 1,000.
Vanderbilt, which finished 19th last year, is ranked in the preseason Top 25 for the first time since 2015, while BYU is back in the poll despite losing one-and-done phenom A.J. Dybantsa, the No. 1 overall pick in the NBA draft.
The best of the rest
Missouri is the top team outside the Top 25, though the Tigers could break in soon. All-SEC forward Mark Mitchell was granted an injunction last week to play another season, and he joins a roster loaded with veterans (Trent Pierce), elite transfers (Jamier Jones, Bryson Tiller, Jaylen Carey and Kennard Davis Jr.) and five-star freshmen (Jason Crowe Jr. and Toni Bryant).
Nebraska was next-best of the rest, while Purdue was among those receiving plenty of votes, though not enough to avoid ending the Boilermakers’ streak of 79 consecutive weeks in the poll. That was second-longest to Houston, which is at 127 and counting.
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AP Basketball Writer Aaron Beard and AP Sports Writer Mark Long contributed.
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