I was on CBS Sports HQ the other night, talking college basketball with the great Adam Schein, and, at some point, he asked if I believed Florida and Duke -- the two schools sitting first and second in the Top 25 poll, the Coaches Poll, KenPom.com, BartTorvik.com and every edition of the Top 25 And 1 for months -- are clearly the two best teams in the sport. At this point, I said, yes. And nothing that happened Thursday pushed me in another direction.
Florida, the team sitting at No. 1 in Friday morning's updated CBS Sports Top 25 And 1 daily college basketball rankings, beat Jacksonville 88-57. Duke, the team right behind the Gators in the Top 25 And 1, beat Coastal Carolina 113-52. Both now have net-ratings at KenPom above 34.03.
Nobody else has a KenPom net-rating above +31.57. So who is better right now -- Florida or Duke? That's the first question I asked Matt Norlander on Friday's episode of the Eye On College Basketball Podcast.
And the best part is that, no matter what any of us believe, we're less than a month from watching them compete against each other. O'Connell Center in Gainesville It'll be Florida-Duke, in a true home-road environment, on the first day of Santa's month, when both are projected to be undefeated. Credit where credit is due, the ACC-SEC Challenge got this right by prioritizing the reigning conference champions and matching them against each other.
It's a great coaching matchup, too. Florida's Todd Golden is 41 years-old, less than two years removed from a national championship, and among the favorites to win another in 2027. Meanwhile, Duke's Jon Scheyer is 39 years-old and literally the winningest Division I men's basketball coach in history through his first four years as a head coach.
Scheyer won 124 games in his first four years at Duke. At this point, Golden and Scheyer both seem headed to the Naismith Memorial Hall of Fame. Either way, they're the two best Under-45 coaches in college basketball right now, according to the Candid Coaches series Norlander and I do annually.
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