Florida is No. 1 in preseason AP Top 25 men's poll as Duke, Illini also receive first-place votes

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.

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 classThe 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 …