Gator Nation, Get Your Game Face On For Basketball, Coming Soon: This Is the Best Team Todd Golden Will Ever Have

Todd Golden is patiently waiting to coach the best squad of his life. (Chris Spears Photo)

By Buddy Martin

GatorBaitMedia.com

Let me tell you something: Defending a national championship, Gator Nation, is the hardest trick to turn in basketball. Ask Duke. Ask Kansas. Ask the ghosts of a dozen “sure thing” repeat teams that got bounced by some mid-major with nothing to lose and everything to prove.

Florida found that out the hard way last March, riding into the NCAA Tournament as a No. 1 seed and getting mugged in the second round by a ninth-seeded Iowa team that apparently didn’t read the scouting report about “unbeatable Gators.” 

So forgive me if I don’t hand Todd Golden the trophy in September. But I will say this: If you’re looking for the most loaded roster in college basketball, quit looking. You found it. It’s parked right there on University Avenue and Lemerand Drive.

The Frontcourt Is a Felony

Start with the big fellas, because that’s where this team commits its violence. Alex Condon, Thomas Haugh and Rueben Chinyelu are back together for one more run, and nearly a hundred Division I coaches surveyed by CBS Sports crowned Florida the overwhelming favorite to be the best team in the country in 2026-27 — 55% of the vote, more than three times runner-up Duke. One coach in that same survey called it flat-out “the best frontcourt in college basketball,” and another cracked that those three could “probably eclipse most teams’ total salaries by themselves” — which, in this era of NIL money, is not exactly a compliment to anybody’s amateur ideals, but it sure is a compliment to Florida’s roster.

Haugh turning down a likely NBA lottery selection — he’d have been Florida’s first lottery pick since Bradley Beal in 2012 — to come back for his senior year is the single biggest reason Florida is sitting at No. 1 in just about every preseason poll that matters, from ESPN to Sports Illustrated to Jon Rothstein’s CBS Sports rankings. The coaches in that same CBS poll voted him the best player in the country for 2026-27, full stop. 

Chinyelu, the reigning Naismith Defensive Player of the Year, is back to make life miserable on the other end, and Condon — who caught fire down the stretch last season, averaging 16.5 points on 61 percent shooting over his final 15 games — gives Golden a third All-America caliber big man.

Hey, they’re built like an NBA squad!

The Backcourt, and a Courtroom Subplot

Boogie Fland and Urban Klavzar man the perimeter, with Klavzar’s 71 three-pointers last season leading the team and Fland expected to take a leap in Year Two under Golden. And then there’s the strangest subplot in Gainesville: Whether Denzel Aberdeen, a key piece of the 2025 title team, gets a fifth season of eligibility. That one’s tied up in an injunction out of a Colorado courtroom rather than anything happening on the hardwood, and if it breaks Florida’s way, Aberdeen slides in as a fifth starter and Klavzar becomes a lethal sixth man — the kind of “problem” every other coach in America would happily trade for.

Add it up, and Florida is bringing back 81.8% of its scoring from a team that won the SEC by three games and cut down the nets in San Antonio — the fourth-highest retention rate for any No. 1 seed in 24 years, with 11 players from last year’s roster still on hand. That’s not a rebuild. That’s not even a reload. That’s a coronation waiting to happen — or a very expensive lesson in complacency, depending on how you want to bet it.

A Schedule Built to Test the Swagger

Golden isn’t ducking anybody, either. The slate opens with an exhibition against Baylor in Jacksonville on October 18, followed by the Orion180 Tip-Off Classic against Miami in Tampa, a home opener versus Jacksonville, a road trip to Florida State, and a Players Era Festival trip to Las Vegas that could put Florida across from Notre Dame, Houston, Rutgers, Auburn, Kansas, UNLV or West Virginia inside of a week. 

Throw in a Duke matchup at the O’Connell Center in the SEC-ACC Challenge and a true road test at Texas before SEC play even gets rolling, and this is a résumé built for a No. 1 seed — assuming the Gators don’t trip over their own hype first.

The Buddy Martin Verdict

Here’s my read, for whatever it’s worth after covering this sport since before some of these kids were born: Florida has the best collection of talent Todd Golden will probably ever coach, and the frontcourt trio of Condon, Haugh and Chinyelu is legitimately the best in America. The pieces are there for Gainesville to throw a second parade in three years. But championships aren’t won on preseason coaches’ polls in September — they’re won in March, on a neutral floor, against some team nobody circled on the schedule. Iowa taught this program that lesson eight months ago.

So my projection: SEC regular-season title, a No. 1 seed with room to spare, and a legitimate Final Four berth — with the frontcourt as good enough to get them back to the last weekend of the season. Whether they cut down the nets a second time is a coin flip even a “loaded roster” doesn’t get to skip. 

Write it down, Gator Nation. We’ll see in April whether I was right — or whether I’m just another sportswriter who fell in love with a really good frontcourt prematurely.