Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

North Florida +10½ -110 over Cal Baptist

10:00 PM EST. Season openers are usually about which team knows itself, and on that count this matchup tonight in Riverside isn't close. North Florida had a miserable 2025-26 — 7-25, five wins in the Atlantic Sun, bounced in the first round of the conference tournament, but the Ospreys open Bobby Kennen's second year with three starters back in uniform, which in the portal era is practically a veteran team. California Baptist, meanwhile, is coming off the best season in program history, its first NCAA Tournament trip behind a WAC Tournament championship and every single player who started for that team is gone. One side of this floor has chemistry on opening night. The other side has name tags.

What North Florida brings back is an identity, and it's a loud one. The Ospreys are the "Birds of Trey": they launched a three-pointer on 51.7 percent of their shot attempts last season, scored 79.6 points a game and played at one of the fastest tempos in the country, a style Kennen carried straight over from the Matthew Driscoll era. Junior Kent Jackson is the engine of it, the team's leading returning scorer at 14.8 points a night after drilling 106 three-pointers last season, second only to the graduated Kamrin Oriol's 20.9. And there's reinforcements from within: Gabe Jacobs managed just 10 games through injury last season, and a healthy Jacobs gives Kennen another real contributor in a rotation that already knows exactly where the shots come from. This group starts a brutal stretch tonight, three straight opponents that danced last March, inside eight days and they'll play like a team with nothing to lose, because they are one.

Cal Baptist's reset is total. The Lancers didn't just lose starters; they lost the whole story Dominique Daniels Jr. and his 23.2 points a game, Martel Williams at 12.8, Jayden Jackson at 9.0, leading rebounder Thomas Ndong off to Saint Mary's, Bradey Henige to Fresno State. Into that vacuum steps first-year head coach Kyle Getter, a longtime Tony Bennett assistant at Virginia, installing the pack-line defence that made the Cavaliers famous. The pack-line is a system that demands five men moving as one, drilled over months of repetition, and Getter has had one offseason with an almost entirely new roster. Expect it to be rigid and stout by January. On the first night of November, against a veteran lineup that shoots threes in waves and pushes the pace, it is a defence still being introduced to itself.

That's the arithmetic behind the points. The total sits at 155.5 because North Florida's style manufactures possessions and shot volume, and a high-possession game is exactly where a double-digit cushion earns its keep: the Ospreys' three-point variance cuts both ways for a favourite trying to build margin, and every empty Lancer trip while the new lineup feels out its roles keeps the underdog inside the number. Cal Baptist may well win its home opener, but asking a first-night rotation, running a brand-new system, to win by 11 against a team that returns its core and bombs away from deep is asking for a polished performance from a group that hasn't played a real minute together. Take North Florida and the points.

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Posted at 10:00 AM EST. Odds are subject to change.

Tennessee -25 -110 over Wofford 

6:00 PM EST. The Volunteers open their season tonight in Knoxville, and this is a program with something to prove. Tennessee won 25 games and reached another Elite Eight last spring, and Rick Barnes is back for year 12, but nobody in that locker room has forgotten the exhibition trip to Duke on October 20, a 103-63 beating where the Vols shot 33.9 percent from the floor and 22.2 percent from deep. Season openers at home don't usually come with an edge to them. This one does, and a Southern Conference visitor is walking straight into it.

The reason this Tennessee team can turn an opener into a rout is that Barnes finally went out and bought a bucket. Only two players are back from last season's roster, DeWayne Brown II and Troy Henderson, and neither was a factor, so the Vols rebuilt through the portal — headlined by Juke Harris, the Wake Forest transfer who averaged 21.4 points and 6.5 rebounds a game last season while shooting 33 percent from three. Tennessee's defense has never been the question under Barnes; it's been the half-court dry spells when a good team takes away the first option. Harris is the high-level, go-get-one scorer this program has been missing for years, and now that firepower gets layered on top of a defense that reloads on pride alone in this building, where the Vols went 14-3 last season.

Wofford is a likeable mid-major story walking into the wrong building on the wrong night. The Terriers won 19 games last season, finished second in the SoCon, and should be in the mix near the top of that league again behind East Tennessee State and Furman — one of the more fun small programs in the South. But Kevin Giltner's second-year team brings back just four players, only two of them starters, and its three leading scorers are gone. Chace Watley, a preseason all-conference pick, and Brian Sumpter carry what's left of the rotation, and the reinforcements include Jacob Daniels, the Peach Belt Freshman of the Year stepping up from Division II, where he averaged nearly 14 points and six assists a night. That's a fine SoCon backcourt in February. In an SEC arena, on opening night, against a top-20 defence, it's a group being asked to grow up in public.

The pressure starts on the first possession and never lets Wofford's young guards breathe, the Terriers' habit of digging early holes against ranked opponents — they've dropped six straight against AP-ranked teams and lost the first half in the last eight of those games — shows up again, and the margin builds in waves as Barnes runs fresh athletes at them for 40 minutes. Tennessee has won 13 straight home games in this ranked-versus-unranked setup, and with Harris giving the offense a finisher it hasn't had, the Vols figure to do some major carnage on opening night. .

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