Sports
College basketball rankings: Polls have Duke, UConn, Kansas lead way-too-early top 25 for 2024-25 – Detroit Free Press
There’s a tradition unlike any other that comes around every year in the first two weeks of April — and, no, it’s not the Masters.
In the hours after a college basketball national champion has been crowned, after the confetti has fallen from the rafters and “One Shining Moment” has played on the videoboard, the look ahead begins with various outlets that cover the sport releasing their top 25 for the following season.
Even in a more stable time for college basketball, it was a challenging, often doomed-to-fail endeavor. After all, a team is seldom ever the same in April as it is by time the first game of the ensuing season rolls around in early November.
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In this day and age, it’s an even more fruitless exercise. About 1,500 players are in the transfer portal, a number that will only continue to rise as programs in every conference and every corner of the country look to remake their rosters. Players testing the NBA Draft waters have until May 29 to withdraw and return to school. Some standouts who plan on jumping to the next level have yet to announce their intentions. The coaching carousel is still active, with perhaps the biggest job in the sport, Kentucky, now open. Unless the Wildcats pluck a coach from the NBA or someone who’s currently out of the sport, their hiring will create a ripple effect across college basketball.
Much of that uncertainty won’t be cleared up for weeks, if not months, making anything resembling a well-informed prognostication incredibly difficult.
Nonetheless, it’s a subject of intense interest for basketball-starved fans who are coming off the exhilaration three weeks of NCAA Tournament action, but are suddenly confronted with the reality of no games for the next seven months.
With the 2023-24 season now officially in the books after UConn’s 75-60 victory against Purdue in the national championship game of the 2024 NCAA Tournament, here’s some of the more prominent media figures in college basketball believe the 2024-25 season might play out:
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This will be updated as more early top 25 rankings are published
The first entry of the group comes from longtime respected college basketball writer Mike DeCourcy, who has Alabama, fresh off its first-ever Final Four appearance, as the No. 1 team. He writes that the Crimson Tide “could become one of the top offenses in recent college history.”
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After coach Jon Scheyer’s team made a run to the Elite Eight in 2024, Duke tops ESPN’s top 25 for next season. The Blue Devils are bringing in the sport’s top-ranked 2024 recruiting class, a group that features five five-star players, including No. 1 overall prospect Cooper Flagg.
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Kevin Sweeney of Sports Illustrated also has Duke as the preseason favorite heading into 2024-25. The Blue Devils have gone nine consecutive years without an NCAA championship, their longest drought since winning their first title in 1991.
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UConn just won its second consecutive national champion. If Fox Sport’s projection is to be believed, the Huskies will be in line to become college basketball’s first team to win three titles in a row since UCLA won seven straight from 1967-73. Writer John Fanta noted that “Connecticut is No. 1 until further notice.”
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Yet another prominent publication is going with Duke, Scheyer and one of the most stacked recruiting classes in recent memory as the 2024-25 favorite at this early stage of the offseason.
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The Field of 68, a college basketball media company and podcast network launched several years ago, has Kansas as its top-ranked team. Though some have yet to make NBA Draft decisions, four of the Jayhawks’ top five scorers last season have remaining eligibility, including former Michigan star Hunter Dickinson.
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