The Florida Gators men’s basketball team added a six-straight win to start the 2024-25 college basketball season, defeating Southern Illinois on Friday, and remains at No. 32 on the ESPN Basketball Power Index heading into its Thanksgiving tournament.
While the Orange and Blue didn’t move from No. 32, the Gators’ BPI is up to 13.5, further broken down as 8.5 (17th) on offense and 5.0 (65th) on defense. All three of those figures are up from our last update (12.8, 7.9 and 4.9). Florida is up six spots in the offensive rankings and moved down one on defense.
“The College Basketball Power Index (BPI) is a measure of team strength that is meant to be the best predictor of performance going forward,” ESPN explains. “BPI represents how many points above or below average a team is. Strength of Record (SOR) is a measure of team accomplishment based on how difficult a team’s W-L record is to achieve. Game predictions account for opponent strength, pace of play, site, travel distance, day’s rest and altitude, and are used to simulate the season 10,000 times to produce season projections.”
ESPN BPI Projections
ESPN now projects Florida to finish the season with a 19.6-10.4 overall record (0.5 more wins than after Week 1) and a 9-9 record in conference play (0.3 more wins) based on results to date and BPI-based projections for remaining scheduled games. The Gators only have 1.0% odds to win the conference, up 0.2% a week ago.
Florida faces the 20th-toughest schedule moving forward with many of its weakest opponents in the rearview mirror. As expected, the SEC slate will be a gauntlet.
NCAA Tournament/Resume
The undefeated start has the Gators ranked 14th overall in strength of record, which translates to a No. 4 seed if the season were to end today — both unchanged from a week ago.
Florida has only played non-conference opponents, which makes its strength of schedule very low (225th) — down from 207th. Many of these numbers will change drastically once the beefier portion of the non-conference schedule begins, and again when SEC play starts up.
ESPN gives Florida 0.1% odds of winning the NCAA Tournament and 0.6% odds of making it to the championship game. A Final Four appearance (2.0%) or Elite Eight appearance (5.7%) are both unlikely at this point, but the odds of a Sweet 16 (16.5%) and Round of 32 appearance (43.7%) continue to increase with each week.
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