Florida Opens at No. 1 in AP Top 25 Preseason Poll With 47 Votes

Florida will open the men's college basketball season at No. 1. The Gators topped the preseason AP Top 25 released on Monday, taking 47 of the 59 first-place votes from a national media panel.

It is the first time Florida has started a season at No. 1 since 2006-07, when the Gators were the defending national champions. The program was last on top of the poll in the final ranking of 2025, after beating Houston to win the school's third national title.

Duke is No. 2 with 10 first-place votes. Illinois is No. 3 with the other two. UConn and Arizona round out the top five, followed by Michigan State, Texas, Tennessee, Virginia and Houston.

"It's cool," Florida coach Todd 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 I want to kind of go into every season at."

Why voters trust Florida

Roster turnover runs through college basketball now, and several ranked teams still have eligibility questions in court. Florida has the opposite problem. The Gators return four of five starters from a team that went 16-2 in the Southeastern Conference last season and earned a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament for the second straight year before Iowa knocked them out in the second round.

Thomas Haugh, Alex Condon and Rueben Chinyelu all played on the national title team. So did Denzel Aberdeen, who spent last season at Kentucky and came back. Aberdeen learned earlier this month that he is eligible to play after a court granted a temporary injunction.

Golden said last season taught his team how to carry a target. Florida opened last season at No. 3, fell out of the poll entirely by early January, then rallied to win the SEC regular-season title. "I think we're more prepared this year for early-season expectations than we were last year," Golden said.

The rest of the poll

Defending national champion Michigan starts at No. 16. The Wolverines lost coach Dusty May and four of five starters to the NBA. Kentucky is No. 23 and sits two weeks away from becoming the first program to spend 1,000 weeks in the AP Top 25.

Purdue fell out of the poll altogether. The Boilermakers had been ranked for 79 straight weeks, the second-longest active run behind Houston at 127. The SEC placed seven teams in the poll, ahead of the Big 12 with six, the Big Ten with five and the ACC with four. Gonzaga, now in the rebuilt Pac-12, is the only team from outside those conferences, at No. 15.

What happens next

The season starts in less than two weeks. Preseason polls settle nothing, but they set the early shape of the bracket race: Florida opens with the deepest returning core in the country, Duke and Illinois carry the only other first-place support, and the SEC starts the year as the league everyone else is chasing.