Kentucky-Florida has turned into a one-sided rivalry. Here’s how dominant UK has been.

What was the biggest rivalry in the Southeastern Conference not that long ago has turned into a one-sided affair over the past five seasons.

Kentucky clearly has Florida’s number.

UK’s 82-74 victory over the Gators on Wednesday night marked the ninth time in the last 10 meetings that Kentucky has come out on top. The only exception in that span came during the Wildcats’ 9-16 campaign — “the COVID season” — when Florida defeated UK 71-67 in Rupp Arena. And the Cats actually defeated the Gators by 18 points on their home court earlier that season.

In fact, Wednesday night marked the fifth time in a row that Kentucky beat Florida on the road, and it’s the first time UK has had a five-game winning streak in Gainesville since 1964, when Adolph Rupp was the Wildcats’ head coach.

Florida has fallen on hard times — relative to the success of the not-too-distant past — in recent years. The Gators won back-to-back national titles in 2006 and 2007 — the last NCAA team to accomplish that feat — and then advanced to at least the Elite Eight in 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014, all under former coach Billy Donovan, who took UF to four Final Fours and won six SEC regular-season titles in his 19 seasons in charge of the program.

Mike White led the Gators to the Elite Eight in 2017 — his second season as head coach — but Florida has not advanced beyond the first week of the NCAA Tournament since then. The Gators are not projected to make the March Madness field this season.

With the latest victory, John Calipari improved to 23-9 against Florida during his 14 seasons as Kentucky’s coach. Calipari had an 11-5 record against Donovan, a 10-4 mark against White and has now taken the first two in the series against first-year coach Todd Golden.

Before Calipari arrived, UK had lost eight of its previous 10 games against the Gators, including six in a row to end the Tubby Smith era, the last four of those games coming against the two Florida teams that ultimately won the national championship. Smith had a 12-10 overall record against Donovan and the Gators in his 10 seasons at Kentucky.

Florida has not been ranked in a game against Kentucky since 2017, and Wednesday’s loss dropped the Gators’ record to 14-14 this season. They lost their star player, Colin Castleton, to a broken hand last week.

Kentucky now leads the overall series 109-41.

The SEC race

With a victory over Florida, the Wildcats moved one step closer to clinching a top-four spot in the final SEC basketball standings. If the Cats finish the regular season in that range, they’ll get an automatic bye into the quarterfinals of the league tournament.

Kentucky (19-9, 10-5 SEC) is now all alone in third place in the conference, behind Alabama (24-4, 14-1) and Texas A&M (21-7, 13-2), which appear likely to lock up the top two spots in the SEC Tournament next month in Nashville.

Behind UK in the league standings are Tennessee (20-8, 9-6) and Auburn (19-9, 9-6), but the Cats have a chance to lock up tiebreakers against both of those teams over the next several days.

Kentucky has already swept Tennessee, and the Cats play Auburn on Saturday, with Vanderbilt (15-13, 8-7) next Wednesday, and both of those games in Rupp Arena. If the Cats beat the Tigers and the Commodores, they’d finish no lower than third place in the SEC standings. (UK will wrap up the regular season next weekend at Arkansas.)

The No. 3 seed in this year’s SEC Tournament gets the 9 p.m. Friday game. The 2 seed will play at 7 p.m. Friday, though UK would need to win out and Texas A&M would have to lose its final three games for the Cats to nab that spot.

Kentucky has not won the SEC Tournament since 2018.

All-around Toppin

An interesting stat for this Kentucky basketball season: only one Wildcat has been the team leader in scoring, rebounding and assists in at least one game during the 2022-23 campaign.

That’s senior forward Jacob Toppin, who has led the Wildcats in points twice, rebounds three times and assists twice.

Toppin has been a model of consistency over the past five weeks of the season. He scored 19 points Wednesday night against the Gators, the 11th consecutive game in which he’s hit double figures. Kentucky has an 8-3 record in that span.

The last time Toppin failed to score in double digits came in UK’s win at Tennessee on Jan. 14, when he had just five points but tallied eight rebounds and dished out five assists.

Fredrick and Wheeler

Key Kentucky guards CJ Fredrick and Sahvir Wheeler were sidelined again Wednesday night.

Fredrick missed his fourth consecutive game with a rib injury. Wheeler was out for the fifth straight game with an ankle injury. UK has not specified a timetable for either player’s return, though Calipari said after Wednesday’s game that Fredrick and Wheeler have been working out with team trainers in recent days. He said neither has practiced.

“Both of those two are really working hard to come back, and they want to play for this team,” Calipari said on his weekly radio show Monday night. “They want to play for the fans. But you gotta be healthy. … You trust the kids. They only know their pain. No one else does.”

Three-time SEC assist king?

Sahvir Wheeler has led the SEC in assists per game in each of the past two seasons, doing it as a sophomore for Georgia in 2020-21 and then repeating the feat as a transfer for Kentucky last year. Wheeler is once again atop the league leaderboard in that stat, but he might not stay there much longer.

To qualify for the statistical superlatives, a player must play in at least 75 percent of his team’s games. After sitting out again Wednesday night, Wheeler has now played in 21 of Kentucky’s 28 games — exactly 75 percent of them. UK has just three games left in the regular season.

Wheeler is currently No. 1 in the SEC with 5.6 assists per game. Tennessee’s Zakai Zeigler is next with 5.3 per game. (Wheeler is also No. 1 in the conference in assist/turnover ratio at 3.0, the best mark of his four-year college career.)

If he gets back on the court and leads the league in assists again this season, Wheeler would be the first SEC player to do it three times in a row since Alabama’s Terry Coner (1985-87). Tennessee’s Rodney Woods (1973-75) also pulled off the three-peat.

Mississippi guard Sean Tuohy is the only player in league history to lead the SEC in assists per game four times. He did it every season from 1979-82.

The other Kentucky players who have topped the SEC in assists per game: Ashton Hagans (2020), De’Aaron Fox (2017), Tyler Ulis (2016), John Wall (2010), Rajon Rondo (2006), Cliff Hawkins (2004), Travis Ford (1994) and Sean Woods (1990).

No Kentucky player has ever led the league in assists two years in a row.

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