One year after the Florida Gators play college football’s toughest regular-season schedule of the modern era — a slate some are referring to as among the toughest in history — the program will … play the exact same SEC teams in 2025. The conference announced Wednesday that it will not only continue an eight-game league season in 2025 but rehash the same schedules from 2024 only flipping the home-and-away alignments.
Florida will host Mississippi State, Tennessee and Texas; visit Kentucky, LSU, Ole Miss and Texas A&M; and battle Georgia at their annual neutral-site showdown in Jacksonville, Florida.
The Gators will also continue home-and-home series with Florida State and Miami, though they trade UCF and Samford in nonconference play for South Florida and Florida A&M.
When the SEC set its 2024 schedule, it did so with the idea that no school would travel to the same location it visited in 2023. The league also insisted that opponents were determined based on a combination of retaining traditional opponents and finding schedule balance, saying fans should not expect return matchups or a complete flip of opponents in 2025.
So much for that.
The strength of schedule formula used for the 2024 schedule had the SEC calculating conference winning percentage since 2012 and dividing opponents evenly with four (two home, two away) ranking among the top eight winning percentages and four (two home, two away) ranking among the bottom eight.
That formula was flawed from the start, of course, because teams can and do change drastically over a decade-long period. The SEC chose not to revisit this strategy let alone adjust the data to account for another season. Seemingly, the idea of parity did not come into play when building the 2025 schedule.
Unlike 2024, when Florida will play Power Four opponents in 11 of its 12 games, it will do so across 10 of 12 games in 2025. Surely, head coach Billy Napier is breathing a sigh of relief. 🙄