Denzel Aberdeen is back home where he belongs

By FRANZ BEARD

Denzel Aberdeen is back home where he belongs. He has nothing but praise for Mark Pope and the entire Kentucky experience last season but Gainesville and the University of Florida is where he wanted to be. It is a chance to win a second national championship in three years as well as an opportunity to become the first person from his family to earn a college degree.

The opportunity to play a fifth year of college basketball back at the place where his career started in 2022 was afforded Tuesday by Judge George M. Wright in the Alachua County Circuit Court. Judge Wright issued a temporary injunction that will allow Aberdeen to play, an injunction that has the merits to withstand an appeal by the NCAA. Denied a waiver to play a fifth year by the NCAA back on May 29, Aberdeen and attorney Jesse Panuccio filed a lawsuit against the NCAA on Sept. 11.

After listening to arguments both by Panuccio and the NCAA lawyers, Judge Wright ruled favorably for Aberdeen on the grounds that the NCAA’s own bylaws legally grant Aberdeen a fifth year of eligibility. The NCAA Division I Council unanimously passed its 5-for-5 legislation that went into effect on Aug. 1. The NCAA has steadfastly held to the notion that athletes who graduated high school in 2022 and played a fourth year in the athletic calendar year that ended July 1, 2026, were ineligible for a fifth year while granting the extra year of eligibility to athletes whose high school graduation year was 2023.

What the NCAA failed to do when it put the new bylaws in place was to explicitly exclude the class of 2022 graduates. In Judge Wright’s court, the NCAA lawyers argued that 2022 grads were never intended to get a fifth season of eligibility, but the intent argument didn’t hold up. Judge Wright ruled that the NCAA wrote the legislation without what is legally known as a “carve-out exclusion” that would prevent a fifth year for athletes who were recruited in 2022. Further, Judge Wright ruled that the NCAA bylaws are a contract with its member schools and athletes are third-party beneficiaries of said contract. Therefore, because the NCAA didn’t explicitly put the 2022 exclusion in writing, it represented a breach of contract.

Judge Wright’s temporary injunction, which grants the fifth year for Aberdeen, will be appealed by the NCAA but legal precedent makes it highly unlikely the ruling will be overturned in a higher court. Rules of legal construction, also known as casus omissus, say that an appellate court cannot add or interpret words that were left out by the legislation’s authors.

With Aberdeen cleared to play, Florida’s already near consensus position as the preseason No. 1 college basketball team in the country is solidified. The Gators return four starters from last season’s team that was the overall No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament (Tommy Haugh, Alex Condon, Rueben Chinyelu and Boogie Fland) and add Aberdeen, a key reserve on the Gators’ NCAA championship team of 2025. At Kentucky last season, Aberdeen averaged 13.5 points, 2.5 rebounds and 3.4 assists per game.

When Kentucky’s season ended in the NCAA Tournament, Aberdeen entered the transfer portal with the hope he could return to the University of Florida.

“I started off with them [Florida],” Aberdeen said Thursday afternoon at the Florida practice facility. “I always knew in the back of my mind I wanted to come back, but I'm very thankful for Kentucky and everything they did for me the past year. It was very fun. People are amazing, but I always knew this is my home. This is where I want to be.”

Leaving Florida after the national championship in 2025 was a difficult experience. NIL money had something to do with it but Todd Golden admits that there were communication breakdowns during the process that led to Aberdeen going to Kentucky.

“Obviously, we didn't want Denzel to leave two years ago, but as I've said, there's things I could have done better and he knows there's things that he probably could have done better in terms of the communication during that time period,” Golden said Thursday. “But man, wouldn't it be really silly to let that affect him coming back and getting his degree from here and having a chance to play with his buddies? It didn't take me very long to get over it. I don't think it took him very long. There was a lot of love when we played them [Kentucky] amongst him and his teammates and our staff. He is a uniquely great young man. To get him back, we felt like it was a win for our program. This guy was here for a number of years. He went to another place and decided he liked this place a lot more. So to get him to come back and be a part here, it means a lot to us.”

Aberdeen’s return means he will finish his collegiate career where it began. When Golden was named Florida’s head coach just days after Mike White resigned to take the Georgia job in the spring of 2022, retaining Aberdeen was a top priority. Aberdeen was a key cog in a two-year run at Orlando’s Dr. Phillips High School in which the Panthers won a state championship then barely missed a repeat in 2022. Two days after his introductory press conference at UF, Golden and assistant Jonathan Safir drove to Orlando to meet with Aberdeen and his family.

Aberdeen could have opted out of his Florida scholarship due to the coaching change, but instead he trusted Golden and elected to stick with his commitment.

“We didn't know him, we didn't recruit him,” Golden said. “Jonathan Safir and I drove down to Orlando about a day or two after we got here to meet with Denzel and his parents. They were very loyal and wanted to be Gators. That's really neat for him. He's gonna graduate from the University of Florida. I think he's the first member of his family that's gonna graduate, so it's a pretty neat story and for us kind of a cool full circle moment from when we first got here.”

A reserve at Florida his sophomore and junior seasons, Aberdeen blossomed as a starter at Kentucky. He went there as a combo guard who could play on the wing and give solid moments at the point, but injuries forced him to become Kentucky’s full-time point guard for most of the season. He had an outstanding assist-to-turnover ratio, played exceptional defense and became a consistent scorer.

As well as the Gators played last year when they went 16-2 in SEC play to win the conference championship, 3-point shooting was an issue. SEC Sixth Man of the Year Urban Klavzar shot 40.6 percent, but no one else even hit 35 percent from distance. Aberdeen shot 36.3 percent which would have been second best had he suited up for the Gators.

Always a very good defender, Aberdeen will team up with Boogie Fland for what might be the best defensive backcourt in the SEC and certainly one of the best in the country. The two of them have already established a good chemistry at both ends of the court, but the defense could be special. The Gators have finished top six nationally in the kenpom.com defensive analytics the last two seasons.

“We both feed off of each other's energy, especially on the defensive side,” Aberdeen said. “It's going to be a crazy thing this year.”

Aberdeen’s focus is locked in on helping the Gators win another championship. In many ways, it’s like he never left because the friendships with Haugh, Condon and Chinyelu endured even during his time at Kentucky. They share a brotherly bond and championship DNA. In many ways they see Aberdeen’s return as the missing link to a team that might be as good or better than any in the country since Rick Pitino-coached Kentucky in 1996.

Haugh, a second-team All-American who elected to return to Florida even though he would have been a lottery pick in the NBA Draft, sees a more complete player in Aberdeen than the one who departed in the spring of 2025.

“I think you guys are going to see a completely different player than when he left here, you know what I think,” Haugh said. “He got so much better over there in Kentucky, running different positions, being super on the ball over there, too. And then coming back here and fine-tuning everything, too, and meshing that with how we play and stuff, it's just going to be a great combo.”

The Gators will face Baylor in an exhibition game in Jacksonville Oct. 18 and Stetson in another exhibition game at the O-Dome on Oct. 27. The regular season begins Nov. 2 when the Gators face Miami in Tampa.