10 men’s college basketball predictions for the 2025-26 season

1. The first two months of the 2025-26 season will be the most electric opening two months in the sport’s history

The progression of college basketball in the eyes of the Average American sports fan typically works like this:

November — The start catches my attention and I love watching during Thanksgiving week when there are games on at seemingly all hours of the day.

December — I am checked out and fully focused on football.

January — I am still mostly focused on football, but paying attention to the headline-grabbing conference games.

February — All right, I’m checking back in to get prepared for March. What’s been going on?

March — Best time of the year. Let’s fill out some brackets, baby.

While reserving judgment, these people are going to be missing out significantly this November and December.

Thanks to some super aggressive scheduling by the biggest names in the sport, there has never been a non-conference portion of the season more loaded than this one. It will be rare this November and December to go a couple days without at least one top 25 versus top 25 showdown on the docket.

It gets started on opening night with Florida vs. Arizona and BYU vs. Villanova, but it doesn’t slow down after that. Get ready for five straight months that won’t give you much of an opportunity to catch your breath.

2. The SEC will once again send double-digit teams to the Big Dance

It takes a near perfect storm to get 14 teams from a 16-team conference into the NCAA Tournament, but that’s exactly what happened with the SEC last season. The conference put together perhaps the most dominant non-conference season the sport has ever seen, and then saw enough parity during league play for all but two of its squads to hear their names called on Selection Sunday.

It would take a minor miracle to repeat that feat in 2o25-26, but that doesn’t mean the league can’t come close.

Twelve teams from the conference are ranked in the top 40 on KenPom, and only one team in the league (South Carolina) is ranked outside of the top 58.

The “basketball conference” jokes are still just that, but the notion that the league is more dominant right now on the hardwood than it is on the gridiron is anything but.

3. Upsets will return to the NCAA Tournament

The 2025 NCAA Tournament was historically chalky.

Every top four seed advanced out of the tournament’s first round for the first time since 2017 and just the fourth time in the modern era of the event. The average margin of victory in the round of 64 was the highest of all-time.

The madness only got more predictable in the second round, with zero teams seeded higher than 10th advancing to the tournament’s second weekend for the first time since 2007. Power conference teams represented the entirety of the Sweet 16 for the first time ever, and a record low of only four total conferences (the four most powerful) were represented in the second weekend. The previous low was seven conferences.

The Big Ten won its first 10 games of the tournament. No conference had ever done that before. The SEC sent seven teams to the Sweet 16. No conference had ever done that before.

The easy conclusion from all of this is relatively straightforward: Two conferences have more money than any two conferences have had in the history of college sports. The financial gap between the power conferences and the mid/low major conferences has never been this big. And the new transfer and NIL rules open the door for the schools with all the money to have the best players, the best coaches and the best everything else on an annual basis.

TLDR: The Cinderella is already dead. The 2025 tournament is just the first time everyone could see the corpse.

The 2026 NCAA Tournament will prove that this was an overreaction.

Sure, the portal and NIL have grown increasingly more important since their inception, but it’s not like they weren’t around the previous two years.

We’re just two years removed from watching a 5th-seeded San Diego State team from the Mountain West and a 9th-seeded Florida Atlantic team from Conference USA battling it out in the Final Four. That tournament also saw the second 16 over 1 upset in the tournament’s history, Furman stun Virginia at the buzzer in the first round, and 15-seed Princeton crash the Sweet 16.

A year later, we had Yale, Grand Canyon, James Madison and Oakland pull first round stunners. Three of those four coming against power conference opponents.

Also, last season wasn’t quite as abnormal as a lot of people made it out to be. When you hear “first tournament without a mid-major team in the Sweet 16 in a billion years,” sure, it’s an attention grabber.

When you look a little bit closer and see that the only “mid-major” in the second weekends of the 2016 and 2017 tournaments was Gonzaga, and that the only “mid-majors” in the second weekend of the 2019 tournament were the Zags and Houston, well, it resonates a bit less.

The big guys dominated the tournament’s second weekend last year, but the big guys domiante the second weekend in most years.

Also, last tournament still saw two teams from the Mountain West advance in the same year for the first time since 2010, it saw McNeese State from the Southland topple Clemson from the ACC, and it saw the Missouri Valley’s Drake Bulldogs take down Missouri from the big, bad SEC.

Some years the madness is just a little more sane than others.

Is Cinderella truly dead? Maybe. There’s certainly evidence to support the belief. But that evidence is largely rooted in the results of four days of basketball. Maybe she’s just taking a breather.

Expect at least a couple of teams seeded 12-16 to pull off the upsets that everyone loves so much this March.

4. At least one freshman will be a consensus postseason First Team All-American, and it won’t AJ Dybantsa

One of the major storylines entering the 2025-26 season is that it may feature the most talented freshman class the sport has seen in some time. BYU’s AJ Dybantsa was the lone member of that class to be named a preseason First Team All-American by the Associated Press, but don’t be surprised if the star of at least one frosh shines just a bit brighter than Dybantsa’s over the winter ahead.

The most likely choice to wear that crown is Kansas superstar Darryn Peterson. Not only has KU head coach Bill Self referred to Peterson as “the best freshman I’ve ever recruited,” he’s stated that he’ll ask Peterson to shoulder more of the scoring load than any Jayhawk freshman to come before him. Those two things alone provide the recipe for a First Team All-America caliber season if Peterson is up to the task, and there’s little to indicate that he isn’t.

Duke stud Cameron Boozer also figures to have an end of season stat line that demands All-America consideration. The super versatile 6’9 forward who has a seemingly endless motor recently scored 24 points and grabbed 23 rebounds in the Blue Devils’ exhibition victory over Tennessee.

5. The ACC will take a step toward returning to its former self

The ACC hasn’t sent more than five teams to the NCAA Tournament since 2021, and got just four teams into the Big Dance last March (and the fourth team was the most controversial selection in the field). While this, surprisingly, hasn’t affected the league’s postseason success — over the past four years the conference with the best NCAA Tournament winning percentage, most Elite Eight appearances, and Final Four appearances is the ACC — everyone associated with the ACC is hoping for a larger postseason representation in 2026.

While Duke and Louisville are widely considered to be the conference’s only legitimate national title contenders, there are a host of other squads with the potential to hear their names called on Selection Sunday. North Carolina is a preseason top 25 team. NC State and Virginia both made exciting head coaching hires and assembled rosters that appear to be NCAA Tournament quality. SMU, Clemson and Miami also have more than enough pieces to be more than just a bubble team come March.

The league’s non-conference performance the last two seasons has been nothing short of embarrassing, with the low point being a 2-14 performance in last year’s SEC-ACC Challenge. While it may not be on the Big Ten or SEC’s level, expect the ACC to acquit itself much better in the opening two months of this season.

6. Constant NCAA Tournament expansion talk will be the one consistent bummer of the season

Talk that the powers that be in college basketball are inching closer and closer to making the NCAA Tournament a 76-team event starting in 2027 has ratcheted up in recent weeks, and likely isn’t going anywhere as the 2025-26 campaign gets underway.

Outside of a handful of head coaches, athletic directors and television executives who stand to personally (but not sizably) benefit from this, nobody associated with college basketball wants this to happen.

Fans of the sport absolutely despise the idea. Media members who cover the sport mostly feel the same. The NCAA Tournament is already the most popular postseason in American sports. There’s no obvious competitive reason for the change. And in an era where massive change is driven by money and virtually nothing else, the financial implications of expansion would seem to be minimal when put up against the pushback from just about everyone who cares about March Madness.

There is simply no logical defense when it comes to messing with one of the few things in sports that just about everyone agrees shouldn’t be messed with it.

Despite its best efforts over decades littered with ineptitude and head-scratching decisions, the NCAA has consistently done one thing well: Organize a tournament that captivates the American public like few other things can for three weeks ever March/early April. The event brings in about a billion dollars a year for the NCAA, a total which accounts for right around 90 percent of the entity’s annual revenue.

You would think those two sentences would be more than enough reason to leave well enough alone, and yet here we are, and here we will continue to be.

The talk won’t go away. An announcement will probably happen during the season that 2026-27 will be the first year of the expanded tournament. Everyone will be mad. The NCAA won’t care.

7. Notre Dame’s Markus Burton will lead the nation in scoring

The Micah Shrewsberry era in South Bend has been a pretty large disappointment thus far, but that’s no fault of Burton’s. The former Indiana Mr. Basketball has been electric in his first two seasons in blue and gold, leading the ACC in scoring at 21.3 ppg last season.

Burton should once again have the green light pretty much every time the ball is in his hands in 2025-26, which will lead to some absurd scoring performances. While the Fighting Irish may not have quite enough pieces to return to national prominence this season, their star guard will earn his fair share of headlines.

8. The Players Era Championship will officially take over Feast Week

After a successful debut in 2024, the Players Era Championship — which takes place in Las Vegas and offers $1 million in name, image, and likeness compensation for all teams participating and an additional $1 million for the winner — will do more than make waves in 2025; It will establish itself as the premiere event of college basketball’s biggest early season week.

The Maui Invitational and Battle 4 Atlantis fields are dramatically depleted thanks in large part to the Players Era Championship’s assembly of a loaded 18-team field headlined by national championship contenders like St. John’s, Houston, Michigan and Gonzaga.

This year’s Maui field? Arizona State, Boise State, Chaminade, North Carolina State, Seton Hall, Texas, USC, and Washington State. Not terrible, but not jam packed with teams entering the season with the weight of Final Four expectations.

This year’s Atlantis field? Virginia Tech, Saint Mary’s, Vanderbilt, South Florida, VCU, Colorado State, Western Kentucky, and Wichita State. Yikes.

Look at this Players Era schedule:

That is constant high-level basketball from the early afternoon into the wee hours of the next morning. You can’t compete with that if you’re Maui or Atlantis.

9. College basketball won’t follow college football’s quick trigger firing trend

There will be college basketball head coaches who don’t make it to March this season. There always are.

The notion that NIL and the transfer portal will result in a number of high-profile head coaches getting the axe before the heart of conference play comes, however, will prove to be inaccurate.

One of the biggest advantages that college basketball has over its gridiron counterpart is that because of the setup of its postseason, hope can spring eternal. In football, powerhouse programs like LSU and Penn State and Florida and others felt comfortable pulling the trigger on their head coach around (or before) the halfway point of the season because they knew all of their preseason dreams had already been shattered. In hoops, there’s always a chance at redemption.

A wildly disappointing season can always be completely flipped on its head with a magical week of conference tournament play, and then a string of wins in the Big Dance.

While some of the coaches on the hottest of seats — Hubert Davis (North Carolina), Adrian Aurty (Syracuse), Bobby Hurley (Arizona State), Mike Young (Virginia Tech), Earl Grant (Boston College), Johnny Dawkins (UCF), Jake Diebler (Ohio State), Matt McMahon (LSU) — may have their fates all but sealed by the time March arrives, most of them will get the opportunity to see things through to the end.

10. UConn will win the 2026 national championship

Queue up the dynasty talk. It’s coming.

Danny Hurley is refreshed and he has a squad. That’s bad news for Hurley haters.