Walk into the Florida basketball complex and the first thing you’ll see is a trophy case. Inside it is a shrine to the Gators’ history, most prominently the men’s program’s back-to-back national titles in 2006 and ’07. Both the official NCAA trophies and the more visually appealing clear-glass basketball presented by the NABC reside there, as well as nets from those tournament runs.
That beautifully manicured collection of championship memorabilia lives in stark contrast to the coaching staff’s offices, where many of the program’s 2025 title relics currently reside, a small reminder of reaching the apex of the college hoops world.
But finding the wooden NCAA championship trophy that head coach Todd Golden hoisted jubilantly in San Antonio now sitting unassumingly on the corner of executive assistant Tracy Pfaff’s desk? That feels out of place.
That temporary home for college basketball’s biggest prize serves as a good reminder of just how fleeting winning a national title is in today’s landscape. The final buzzer sounded at 10:09 p.m. CT on April 7. The team partied well into the night, then got on a plane back to Gainesville, Fla., the next day … and that was that.
By Wednesday, fewer than 40 hours since confetti fell, Golden and his staff held meetings with potential returning players trying to lock in contracts for 2025–26. The team was honored at the football team’s spring game that Saturday and hosted a key transfer portal recruit early the next week. Then, the entire starting five left Gainesville for offseason workouts with NBA draft decisions looming.
“You wake up on Tuesday morning and you’ve won the national championship and you just get back on the bus. You come home and watch TV that night and you’re like, ‘All right, well, gotta try to do that s--- again,’ you know?” Golden says.
The chase started with the Gators playing catch-up. The transfer portal had been open for 15 days when Florida won the title. The market for top players was spiking because of fears that the imminent approval of the House v. NCAA settlement could reset the market, putting restrictions on outside NIL deals in the new revenue-sharing era that also capped the amount each school could pay its players. Golden told his staff to eschew recruiting the portal while the team was still playing. He didn’t want his current players to think the staff was distracted from the task at hand. The lone exception was Princeton point guard Xaivian Lee, a high school teammate of forward Thomas Haugh. Golden called Lee in the week leading up to the Final Four to express formal interest. Even the work the Gators did prior to the tournament on negotiating with potential returnees Haugh and Alex Condon had to be ripped up, both because of the market’s explosion and those players’ value having increased in the March run. No player is completely unmovable in 2025, and Florida had to be able to offer close to market value to avoid any chance of its stars getting wandering eyes.
“This is a production-based business, and where we were on March 9 was a lot different than where we were on April 7,” Golden says.
It quickly became apparent the $5 million to $6 million the Gators budgeted for the 2025–26 roster in early March wouldn’t go nearly as far as they thought. Golden had plenty of tough conversations with athletic director Scott Stricklin and the program’s top donors to pool together the cash necessary to keep Condon, Haugh, 6' 10" center Rueben Chinyelu and 7' 1" big man Micah Handlogten and lure top portal targets like Lee. Guard Denzel Aberdeen, a Florida native, surprisingly hitting the portal and landing a payday north of $2 million from Kentucky only added to the urgency. While it may have been slightly easier to have those conversations fresh off a championship, the shortfall was steep: Florida needed more than $10 million to build another title-caliber roster.
“If we want to make sure we’re in position to possibly get back to making a deep run in this tournament, this is what was out there. This is what our guys could have gotten,” Golden says of those donor conversations. “I think everybody [in college basketball] had that, ‘Wow, this is out of control’ or, ‘This is a lot more than last year’ conversations among their staffs, their donors, the people supporting their program.”
Lee, a supremely talented scorer, committed on his visit after being wowed by the Gators’ in-depth plan to take his game to the next level while competing in the tough SEC. Eight days later, Haugh confirmed he was returning despite initially putting his name in the NBA draft pool. “I knew I wanted to be back in school, and I didn’t want to not give my whole 100% to the predraft process,” Haugh says. Florida sold Haugh on the chance to play more on the wing as a junior, with a starting spot open at the three instead of his role the previous year as a super sub at the four. It could help boost Haugh’s draft stock and let the Gators get all their best players on the floor at the same time. If all went according to plan, Haugh could convince Condon to return at his usual power forward slot and the Gators could retain arguably the best frontcourt in the country.
Condon, the best draft prospect of the potential returners, says going into the NBA combine in May, he was actually 60-40 to stay in the draft. (Haugh, his best friend, isn’t so sure. “I knew he was coming back from the beginning,” Haugh says with a laugh.) Projected as a late first-round or early second-round selection, Condon was closely watching how Golden and the Gators’ staff rebuilt the roster. If he was going to spurn the guaranteed contract for a pick in the No. 30 to 40 range, he wanted a real chance to repeat.
“The pickups they got in the portal were pretty important [to me],” Condon says. “Just to make sure we’re going to be a title-contending team again.”
As the Gators waited on Condon and Chinyelu, who received a G League Elite Camp invite, to make their stay-or-go decisions, they were busy working on landing the missing piece: a dynamic ballhandler to pair with Lee in the backcourt. The target was Arkansas guard Boogie Fland, who put his name into the portal on the last day possible to keep options open but seemed more likely to stay in the draft. A midseason hand injury derailed a promising start for the former five-star prospect, making his NBA stock a bit murky. Fland called it “very humbling” to consider a second year of college after long projecting as a one-and-done, but says he knew he had “more potential to tap into.” And the burgeoning NIL market where Fland is reportedly making millions made it a much easier financial decision to consider staying in school.
He was officially sold on a college return after his first conversation with Golden, who laid out how they could help Fland rebuild his stock by improving as a finisher around the rim and adding muscle. A year ago, Walter Clayton Jr. came back to Florida after having been on the fringes of the 2024 draft, elevated his game, set the Gators’ single-season scoring record and became a first-round pick in June. Alijah Martin transferred in from Florida Atlantic for the ’24–25 season, had the best year of his career and was drafted No. 39 by the Raptors. The pitch was enough to convince Fland to withdraw from the draft midway through the combine and, shortly thereafter, he picked the Gators.
Condon saw a similar chance to jump up boards with another season in Gainesville. He says 2025–26 will definitely be his last year in college after coming so close to making the jump this summer. He’ll get to show off the strides he has made as a shooter and decision-maker that can translate to the next level. “I feel like I’m a different player this year,” Condon says.
It’s an offseason that couldn’t have been scripted much better.
So brings the Gators to their next challenge: sharpening this group into a championship-caliber team.
Golden knows they have the pieces, at one point during a practice huddle reminding the team they have “elite talent.” What needs to follow: Being “f---ing elite in our preparation and elite in our execution.” During a drill, he barks that if any player makes the same defensive mistake they just witnessed in practice during a game, they can head to the sideline without waiting for Golden to sub them out.
Last season Florida played primarily three-guard lineups with 6' 4" sharpshooter Will Richard at the three. Now it will be Haugh, a physical 6' 9" forward who made fewer than one shot from beyond the arc per game in 2024–25. The Pennsylvania native looks leaner and more mobile, and offensively has quieted down his shooting mechanics and improved his handle.
“My first year I was here and last year, I didn’t really have the skills to be on the wing, I’ll be honest,” Haugh says. “I didn’t feel comfortable dribbling the ball, didn’t feel comfortable enough in my shot. But this summer, I think I took a big leap … I feel confident to be in that spot.”
Between Haugh’s improvement from the perimeter and Condon rebuilding his jump shot during the predraft process Florida’s staff is confident they’ll still space the floor as well as last season. Lee brings some of the same off-the-dribble three-point prowess that Clayton did, while Fland, who has added 17 pounds of muscle since his arrival, is also dynamic at three levels.
The biggest challenge is the much-discussed “hunted” label. For as good as Florida was last season, it wasn’t until March that it was taken seriously as a title contender.
“People were like, ‘Oh, they’re good, but are they really that good?’ ” Golden says. “And then we won the SEC tournament and people were like, ‘Oh f---, they’re going to win the national championship.’ And we really had to adjust to that.”
You’d be hard-pressed to find a preseason Top 25 without the Gators in the top five. The players say the drive is even stronger now that they’ve tasted success, and Golden has seen that manifest in their approach.
“They’re not running from the challenge,” Golden says. “These guys have all come back and I feel like they’ve worked even harder than they did last year. They’re not showing any signs of being content.”
Before a September practice, players and coaches alike bounce around the gym, energy exploding from the huddle, the weight of the impending chase to repeat nowhere to be found. The moment of pure joy and togetherness then quickly shifts to intense focus as Golden gets into the lesson plan for the day.
“My first year I was here, you’d see a couple of people in the gym,” Haugh says. “Last year you saw everybody in the gym and this year you see everybody in the gym. Nobody takes their off days. Last year was really cool and stuff, but we’re ready to go again.”
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as Inside the $10 Million Race to Keep Florida Men’s Basketball on Top.