It was much closer this time around, but the SEC once again captured the ACC/SEC Challenge, winning 9 games to the ACC’s 7.
The ACC stormed to a 6-3 lead on Tuesday, only to see SEC teams benefit from home-court advantages on Wednesday to rally for the Challenge victory. Arkansas, Alabama, and Auburn all secured wins that should age beautifully in the process.
From the ACC’s perspective, it was a solid showing, more evidence that the conference is vastly improved from the meager 4-bid league it fielded in 2024-25, when only Duke advanced beyond the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
For the SEC, it was proof that rumors of the league’s demise as a basketball power were overstated. Sure, the league isn’t the absolute wagon it was a year ago, when 7 SEC teams reached the Sweet 16, 2 advanced to the Final Four, and Florida won the program’s third national championship. But the SEC is still a force to be reckoned with, the top ranked league in both KenPom and Bart Torvik’s analytical rankings, and well on the way to double-digit NCAA Tournament bids for the second-consecutive season.
Here are 5 takeaways from the ACC/SEC Challenge.
Duke’s narrow win over Florida was one of the best games of the year to date
Saturday Down South was in Cameron Indoor Stadium for No. 4 Duke’s nip-and-tuck 67-66 win over No. 15 Florida, which was by far the best game in the 16 game ACC/SEC Challenge.
After a tight first 10 minutes, Duke closed the opening half on a 17-5 run, buoyed by the brilliant play of freshman Cam Boozer. Just a year removed from Cooper Flagg winning National Player of the Year honors as a freshman, Boozer is an early frontrunner himself, and he was magnificent on Tuesday, getting to most of the spots he wanted to on the floor in the first half and doing an incredible job finishing over Florida’s excellent post defense, length and athleticism. Boozer would finish with 29 points, 6 rebounds, and 2 assists.
Florida’s guards struggled mightily with Duke’s length and defense in the opening half, with the trio of Boogie Fland, Urban Klavžar, and Xaivian Lee shooting just 2-17 in the opening half and a dismal 1-10 from beyond the arc.
The Blue Devils led by as many as 15 points, and when they scored the opening basket of the second half, the lead was 14 again.
That’s when Florida found itself for perhaps the first time since early in the season opener against Arizona.
Boogie Fland played more assertively, getting into the paint at will and scoring in the midrange and at the rim. Tommy Haugh (24 points, 6 rebounds) continued to build on his All-American campaign, hitting massive shots and playing outstanding defense on Caleb Foster, Dame Sarr, and whichever member of Duke’s supporting cast was thrown his direction.
Alex Condon got involved in the mid-post, facing up defenders and attacking the basket, forcing the Duke defense to help and scoring multiple big-time buckets to help Florida chip away.
Todd Golden wisely refused to double Boozer, relying on the tremendous defense of Rueben Chinyelu to force Boozer left and make him uncomfortable for the first time in his college career. Boozer missed 7 consecutive field goals in the second half, almost exclusively a product of Chinyelu’s physicality and quickness.
Klavžar hit a huge 3 to cut Duke’s lead to 3 in the second half and later swiped the ball from Boozer to help the Gators tie the affair at 59. A Boozer 3 quickly gave Duke the lead again, but Florida wouldn’t go away, and the Gators reclaimed the lead, 66-64, when Fland buried a 3 off a beautiful horns set with just 30 seconds remaining.
This was the Florida team most folks thought the Gators had built in the preseason.
But just as it seemed Florida would swipe the best win of the year for any program, Duke head coach Jon Scheyer drew up a beauty:
Duke ran an inverted pick-and-roll, getting the ball to Boozer at the top of the arc off a ball screen. Klavžar tagged screener Isaiah Evans initially but then cheated just a bit to help Chinyelu force Boozer to his weaker left hand. The extra help created just the space Isaiah Evans needed to veer and flash open off the ball screen. Evans was 0-7 from deep on the evening, but this time, given a clean look, he was pure.
Scheyer, whose Duke team scored 18 points after timeouts on Tuesday evening, said the play was “exactly” what was drawn up — and called the ensuing roar “the loudest he’d ever heard Cameron Indoor,” either as a national title-winning player, assistant, or head coach.
Duke still needed 2 stops to win, but Fland dribbled off his leg on the first possession and Tommy Haugh’s desperate pass with 1.5 seconds remaining was deflected by Maliq Brown, sealing the win for the Blue Devils.
The game wasn’t without controversy.
An obvious Duke goaltend of a Haugh layup late in the first half was not called, costing the Gators 2 points in a game Florida lost by 1. And Haugh was bizarrely called for a dead ball technical while shielding his body in the air from an oncoming Patrick Ngongba on this sequence, which allowed Duke to send a free throw shooter of its choice (Evans) to the line and gave Duke an extra possession, allowing Duke to extend its slim lead late in the second half.
That call may have been justice for a similarly controversial flagrant called on Maliq Brown in the opening half, except that Duke was without a challenge (it had lost its challenge earlier in the game) on the Haugh play, making Scheyer’s pleas for a review especially suspect.
Still, as Golden pointed out after the game, you have to expect you won’t get the benefit of the doubt from officials on the road, and you have to fight through it to win at a place at Cameron against a team as talented as Duke.
Florida had its chance to win with 1 stop. The Gators didn’t get it.
The Gators are now without a clear Quad 1 win, and things won’t get any easier with yet another tough game in a hostile environment coming next week when Florida plays UConn at the Jimmy V Classic.
Can Florida bottle what it found in the second half rally at Cameron? It’ll need to do that and perhaps be even better to avoid matching its season loss total from last year’s national championship team in just 9 games this season.
Long term, Florida will be fine, as long as the Fland the Gators have seen the last 2 games is the one they get for the next few months. But being a defending champion is different, no matter how much you insist you aren’t defending anything in the offseason.
As for Duke, the 9-0 start is the best in nearly a decade, and even though this group lacks the high-end talent of last year’s Final Four team, there’s an argument they defend better as a group. The Blue Devils are certainly Final Four good.
A win that will last for Arkansas
No. 25 Arkansas couldn’t finish against Duke on Thanksgiving, overwhelmed by a 27-11 Duke run over the final 10 minutes that saw the Blue Devils simply suffocate the Hogs offensively and get whatever they wanted in the paint offensively.
The Hogs responded with aplomb in Fayetteville on Wednesday night.
Arkansas led No. 6 Louisville by 18 points in the first half, stifling the Cardinals’ explosive offense on the perimeter in holding the Cardinals to a season-low 22% (8-37) from beyond the arc. Trevon Brazile (21 points, 5 rebounds, 2 steals) was fantastic for Arkansas, as was sensational freshman Darius Acuff Jr. (17 points, 10 assists, 4 turnovers).
But the story of the game for John Calipari’s team was defense.
Limiting Louisville, who entered the night ranked second in the country in offensive efficiency, to just 29 points in the first half, and zero in transition, is stupendous.
If Arkansas is going to guard at that level, the Hogs are good enough to win the SEC Championship.
Is it time to panic for Kentucky? Or will getting healthy fix it?
There’s no question Kentucky is banged up.
The Wildcats didn’t have Jaland Lowe, Jayden Quaintance, or Mo Dioubate in their 67-64 loss to No. 16 North Carolina at Rupp Arena on Tuesday night, and it showed.
Kentucky was pummeled 41-30 on the glass by the Tar Heels, who weren’t terribly efficient (1.05 points per possession) but made good use of the 20 offensive rebounds they collected to claw out a win in the final 5 minutes. The win was the first Power 5 nonconference road win of the Hubert Davis era. No, really.
Kentucky should compete better inside when Dioubate returns, and if Quaintance can play this season and be productive, there’s still upside to Mark Pope’s pricy frontcourt.
But will it matter if they don’t get more from their guards and wings?
Denzel Aberdeen has been excellent defensively, but he’s still plagued by the offensive inconsistency and shot selection issues that made it easier for Florida to decline to match Kentucky’s lucrative NIL offer this offseason.
Colin Chandler is a great shooter, but he is a young player still learning to finish at the rim.
And Jaland Lowe might give Kentucky a guy who can get into the paint and get to the free throw line when he returns, but he’s not a good shooter, and won’t solve the problem Kentucky has when defenses stay attached to Chandler and dare someone else to make a play late in the shot clock.
That player was supposed to be Otega Oweh, the preseason SEC Player of the Year who donned many All-American lists. But he’s best as a cutter or driver off zoom and dribble hand-off actions, not as a late-shot-clock isolation threat.
Without a post scorer, Carolina was able to key on halting dribble penetration, and the result was a scoring drought of 10 minutes and 25 seconds for Kentucky in the second half, a run that included 13 consecutive missed field goals.
Kentucky is now 0-3 against the Power 5, with Gonzaga, Indiana, and St. John’s all looming.
It’s too soon to call this $22 million roster a bust. But Kentucky is in trouble. And it’s not clear simply getting healthy fixes it.
The Jungle remains magical for Auburn
Auburn has recovered beautifully from being shellacked by Michigan in Las Vegas, and on Wednesday night, the Tigers demonstrated the Jungle will still rock in a world without Bruce Pearl.
The Tigers (7-2) shot 59% from the field, 55% from deep and scored 1.19 points per possession in manhandling Will Wade’s talented NC State team 83-73 in a game that felt less close.
Most important? On a night when Tahaad Pettiford went AWOL (1-7 FG, 0-3 from 3, 4 turnovers), the Tigers got a monster game (28 points, 10 rebounds) from Keyshawn Hall and an electric night from Kevin Overton (29 points, 6-9 3P FG) to overcome the poor showing from their All-American candidate. Hall also gives Auburn a guy who can make something out of nothing when everything breaks down. There aren’t many teams in America that have one of those players, let alone 2 like Auburn.
Hall has scored 20 points or more in all but 2 of Auburn’s games, proving he is a SEC Player of the Year candidate in his own right — and giving Steven Pearl an offense that can score on anyone while Auburn figures its defense (61st in KenPom efficiency) out ahead of league play.
An impressive win for a team that is building a nice résumé.
Is Vanderbilt the SEC Favorite?
It isn’t too early to suggest this and we’re going to keep suggesting it until Florida, Alabama, Arkansas, Kentucky, or Auburn prove we shouldn’t.
No. 17 Vanderbilt continued its red-hot start by mauling previously unbeaten SMU 88-69 at Memorial Gym. Tyler Tanner was sensational, building on a brilliant Battle 4 Atlantis with a 26-point, 6 assist, 5 rebound evening where he once again played at an absurdly efficient level (10-14 from the field, including 2-5 from 3).
Mark Byington’s team is the lone SEC team in the top 10 in KenPom (7th) and they are the nation’s second most efficient offense, behind only Purdue.
The frontcourt continues to punch above its weight, too. The Commodores rank in the top 50 nationally in defensive rebounding (42nd), answering the biggest question about the team on paper with a resounding display of will and want on the glass early this season.
This is the team to beat in the SEC.
Neil Blackmon covers SEC football and basketball for SaturdayDownSouth.com. An attorney, he is also a member of the Football and Basketball Writers Associations of America. He also coaches basketball.
