Role Reversal: Ranked Georgia at O'Dome to Face Unranked Gators
Tuesday, January 6, 2026 | Men's Basketball, Chris Harry
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By: Chris Harry, Senior Writer
GAINESVILLE, Fla. – No shortage of storylines for this one.
Mike White coming back to his former school will always be noteworthy, of course, but Tuesday night's Southeastern Conference showdown between Florida (9-5, 0-1) and 18th-ranked Georgia (13-1, 1-0) at Exactech Arena/O'Connell offers up a lot more intrigue between a pair of programs dealing with drastically different circumstances than the series has presented over the last … oh … three decades.
The last time an unranked UF team faced a ranked UGA team was – get this – in 1996. That bunch of Gators would go 12-16 and see their coach, Lon Kruger, bolt for Illinois and lead to the hiring of Billy Donovan, who proceeded to guide the Gators to unfathomable heights. That batch of Bulldogs would go on to win 21 games, reach the Sweet 16 and watch their coach, Tubby Smith, leave for Kentucky after the season.
[Read senior writer Chris Harry's "Pregame Stuff" setup story here]
Fast forward 30 years.
UF, coming off its third NCAA championship courtesy of its second NCAA title-winning coach, started the 2025-26 campaign ranked No. 3 in the nation, but already has lost more games this season than all of last season, including Saturday's deflating 76-74 road defeat at Missouri in the SEC opener, and plummeted out of the Top 25. They Gators have lost games by six, four, one, four and two points. In each defeat, they either led or were within a possession inside a minute to play.
"We're close," Gators coach Todd Golden said. "We've won all of our games by a lot [and] lost all of our games by a little. We're kind of right on that breaking point. We've got to find a way to finish out a couple of these. And I do think we're dealing with some confidence issues shooting the ball."
More on those "issues" below.
UGA, meanwhile, started the season unranked and in its fourth season under White has rolled out a breakneck brand of basketball that has the Bulldogs playing the No. 2-fastest tempo in all of college basketball. It's a style of play unrecognizable to UF fans who over White's seven seasons (that included 142 wins and four NCAA Tournament berths) watched his teams play to a pace that averaged 222nd nationally. Now, he's overseeing an offense that leads the country in scoring (99.4 points) and fast-break points (27.0) per game, while rocketing the Bulldogs to their highest ranking since the 2003 season. Georgia, which opened its league slate Saturday with a wild 104-100 overtime home defeat of Auburn, is off to its best 14-game start since – get this, again – the 1930-31 season.
White is 1-6 against his former team. He did, of course, hand the Gators their final loss of the 2025 season -- UF went on to win 12 straight and cut down the nets in San Antonio -- with a court-storming upset win at Athens last Feb. 28. He's 0-3 at the O'Dome, however.
"We'll fly around. We'll play hard. We'll be prepared," White told reporters in Athens. "This team has a pretty healthy level of intrinsic confidence, and you'll need that to go down there and play against a team that's coming off a national championship. But it's a great opportunity and we'll have fun with it."
Georgia coach Mike White (right) with standout shooting guard Blue Cain.
So, the tables for these two programs, at least momentarily, have turned. It'll be fascinating to see how the Gators react to adversity and the Bulldogs react to expectations.
Regarding the former, UF has undermined dominant rebounding and mostly outstanding defense with terrible 3-point shooting. At 28.0%, the Gators are on pace for the program's lowest 3-point shooting percentage since the NCAA's advent of the line in advance of the 1986-87 season. UF's worst 3-point season to date? That would be the 30.3% shot during the '21-22 season, which was White's last with the Gators.
They're getting open looks, but those looks aren't falling. In the five losses (again, by a combined 17 points, where one measly 3 perhaps would have made a difference) the Gators are 10-for-40 on open catch-and-shoot 3s (that's 25.0%), with a 3-for-13 performance (23.1) in the loss at Mizzou.
"It's made our margin for error smaller and highlighted some of our fouling issues and the times we don't get some of the big rebounds," Golden said of his team's shooting woes. "But I think a lot of those issues wouldn't look so big if we could help ourselves out by making some shots."
Junior wing Thomas Haugh (left), the Gators' leading scorer at 17.2 points per game, is one of just two players in the UF rotation averaging better than 27% from the 3-point line. Haugh is at 33.3%, which is second to backup guard Urban Klavzar at 35.7.
Against Missouri, the Gators shot better from the 2-point area, out-rebounded the Tigers (barely) and only turned the ball eight times against one of the most aggressive defenses in the league. Being merely below average from the 3-point line – as opposed to the worst among the nation's 79 power conference teams – might have translated to two or three more wins.
Now, UF has to try to outscore college basketball's highest-scoring team. The Bulldogs, winners of seven in a row, have hit the 100-point mark six times, including twice reaching 120. And while they're hardly elite defensively, they've been good enough and also lead the nation in blocked shots at 8.0 per game. Those blocks lead to transition opportunities, at which they obviously excel.
Against Auburn, in a game that featured 13 lead changes and 11 ties, UGA was ahead by four points with the clock running and two seconds to play when the Bulldogs – after being told by White and his staff repeatedly not to foul – reached and fouled a 3-point shooter with 0.7 on the clock. The Tigers made the first two free throws, intentionally missed the third, managed to grab the rebound and quickly threw in the game-tying basket at the buzzer to send the game into OT.
Georgia, nonetheless, shook off the boneheaded play, showed resilience and prevailed in the extra period against a program that was in the Final Four nine months ago. That's what good teams do.
"We're 1-0 [in SEC], no matter how you draw it up," White said afterward.
And now they're looking to build on the program's greatest start to a season in almost a century. At the Gators' expense, no less.
