Todd Golden wins SEC Coach of the Year

GAINESVILLE, Fla. — After leading the Florida Gators to their first regular season conference championship since 2014, Todd Golden has been named the SEC Coach of the Year. The league unveiled its men’s basketball post season awards Monday as selected by the SEC’s head coaches.

Golden is the first UF coach to win the award since 2017 and the fourth overall in program history.

After a 5-4 start to 2025-26, Golden led the defending national champions to the second-most SEC wins in school history (16) and the fourth-most regular season wins by a UF team (25). Florida reached 25 wins before the postseason for the second time in a row after 27 last year.

The Gators (25-6, 16-2 SEC) closed out the regular season with 11 straight wins, which is tied for UF’s third-longest SEC winning streak and 10th longest overall winning streak in program history. Three of Florida’s 13 double-digit win streaks have occurred under Golden.

Golden earned his 100th win at Florida in the regular season home finale. He is the quickest UF coach in program history to reach the mark at 139 games, surpassing Billy Donovan’s previous record of 154.

Golden also became the third coach ever to win 100 games within his first four seasons at an SEC school, along with John Calipari and Tubby Smith (both at Kentucky).

“I think it’s more of a reflection of the guys that have been in program and the job our staff has done over the first four years,” Todd Golden said after his 100th career win with the Gators. “We have a great staff. We lost Kevin [Hovde] and John [Andrzejek] after last year’s national championship run, but having guys like Carlin [Hartman], Jonathan [Safir] and Korey [McCray} and obviously Taurean [Green] and Dave [Klatsky], I feel really fortunate to have the staff I have. We give guys a lot of responsibility. We have got a lot of talented guys. They do a really good job taking care of the business. They are sure that their side of the street is clean for our team to be successful.

“We need to have really good players in our program to be successful and we’ve done a really good job of finding the type of guys that are successful at Florida. Really talented that are smart, that unselfish and just really good competitors. Guys that might not have been ranked really high but really love to compete to and don’t care about the credit. For me, it’s my job to take that we keep on recruiting the right guys and do what we can to retain our staff. And when we lose them to head jobs, make sure we find other talented guys that can come take their place. I’m proud of the organization that we have. What we’re doing and we don’t plan on stopping anytime soon.”

Florida’s SEC Coach of the Year winners

1991-92 Lon Kruger (AP/Coaches)
1993-94 Lon Kruger (AP/Coaches)
2010-11 Billy Donovan
2012-13 Billy Donovan
2013-14 Billy Donovan
2016-17 Mike White
2025-26 Todd Golden

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