SEC Tournament: Sign of Success or Red Herring?
The Gators are looking to put another feather in their hat by winning the SEC men’s basketball tournament. If the Gators manage to pull it off, it’ll be the first time since the 2013-14 season that they’ll be both regular-season and tournament champions.
But the SEC tournament is just a precursor to a much bigger, more important tournament: March Madness.
Florida has one of the best records in the SEC tournament. Florida’s one of the only teams outside of Kentucky that has won the tournament three times in a row – 2005, 2006 and 2007.
The SEC tournament is just a single championship, though. The real question for Florida is how predictive winning the tournament is for March Madness.
Let’s start with the Gators’ most recent tournament win: 2025. While they weren’t regular-season champions, they defeated Tennessee, 86-77. In the NCAA tournament that year, the Gators defeated the Houston Cougars in a nail-biting game, 65-63.
Florida’s previous time winning the SEC tournament was all the way back in the 2013-2014 season. That year, it captured the SEC as both regular-season and tournament champions.
Unfortunately, that year, luck wasn’t on their side. While the Gators made it to the Final Four, they lost 63-53 against the eventual national champions, the University of Connecticut. Of course, the loss doesn’t look bad in hindsight. UConn was a powerhouse that season and was a forerunner to a three-peat. At least it would have been if it hadn’t been banned from postseason play the previous year and boycotted the next.
You have to go back a long way after the 2013-2014 season to see the last time Florida won the SEC tournament. While it did win the regular season in the 2012-13 and 2010-11 seasons, winning the tournament just apparently wasn’t in its schedule for those years.
No, the last time the Gators won the SEC tournament before 2013-2014 was the 2006-07 season. That season also marked the first time in this century that the Gators won both the SEC regular season and the SEC tournament.
The 2006-07 season was also a pretty special year for Florida, all things considered. It was the year the team completed its three-peat in the SEC tournament and the year Florida won back-to-back national championships, beating Ohio State, 84-75. It was also the first time the tournament had back-to-back champions since Duke in 1991 and 1992.
While the Gators didn’t win the SEC regular-season championship during the 2005-06 season, the team won the SEC championship that year, giving them back-to-back victories.
Now, if the 2006-07 season was special for the Gators, then the 2005-06 season was really special. After all, that was the year Florida won its first-ever national basketball championship, defeating the UCLA Bruins, 73-57.
That Florida team was led by the now head coach of the Chicago Bulls, Billy Donovan, and had a jaw-dropping core –Joakim Noah, Al Horford, Taurean Green, Corey Brewer and Lee Humphrey – all of whom, aside from Humphrey, went on to have varying degrees of success in professional basketball. That same core also led Florida to the previously mentioned 2006-07 national championship.
And now, we’re back at the beginning of Florida’s miracle run, the 2004-05 season. Florida didn’t win the SEC regular season that year. That honor went to Kentucky. But Florida won the SEC tournament championship. 2004-05 was also the first season we got to see Billy Donovan’s team do something special, after all, it was eliminated during the first round of March Madness during the 2003-04 season.
The outcome then set the foundation for what the Gators would do in the following years.
With Todd Golden already reaching 100 wins faster than Hall of Famer Billy Donovan, it shouldn’t be a surprise if he breaks the postseason records set by Donovan as well.
As for the team, well, winning the SEC and NCAA Championships this year is definitely more than feasible. For them, it’s expected.
Category: Basketball, College Basketball, Gator Sports, Gators Men's Basketball
