2025 Preseason Ceiling and Floor Team Outcomes

Using preseason simulations to get best and worst case scenarios for every team

Oct 23, 2025

Part of what makes college basketball so entertaining is how hard it is to predict who will be good. We argue all offseason about the minutia of every set of preseason rankings, only for them to all be massively wrong by January.

Instead of focusing solely on where each team is placed in my preseason team rankings at EvanMiya.com, a more interesting angle is to use the uncertainty estimates attached to each team’s preseason projection to determine their ceiling and floor outcomes. Using 10,000 season simulations, I have calculated various possibilities for how the season will unfold.

Some teams have more uncertainty attached to their preseason projection than others. These teams usually have common themes: a new head coach, more reliance on freshmen, or more roster turnover. Teams like Auburn, Baylor, and Duke have more variance, while the model is more confident in the possible outcomes for teams like Purdue, Iowa State, and Florida.

To present this data on a national level, I’m breaking it down by conference and presenting the median (most likely), ceiling (95th percentile), and floor (5th percentile) outcomes for each team. This means there is a 90% chance a given team will have a national ranking within their ceiling and floor outcomes at the end of the year.

First, though, I want to briefly mention the teams with the highest and lowest levels of preseason uncertainty according to my model. The table below shows the teams with the most preseason uncertainty (high-ceiling, low-floor) inside the preseason top 50 at EvanMiya.com:

The table below shows the teams with the least preseason uncertainty (low-ceiling, high-floor) inside the preseason top 50 at EvanMiya.com:

Only six teams have a ceiling finish of #1 in the country: Houston, Purdue, Duke, Florida, UConn, and Michigan. While another team can be the best-rated team at the end of the year according to the analytics, it’s much more unlikely than for these seven. In fact, only three times in the last 15 years has a team finished #1 at EvanMiya.com without having a preseason ceiling finish of #1 (UConn 2022-23, Villanova 2017-18, Gonzaga 2016-17). Let me also be clear that a team’s ceiling finish does not refer to their chances of winning a national title. In college basketball, the best team in the sport often does not win the ultimate trophy at the end of the season.

Here are the teams presented by conference, from best conference to worst, according to the preseason conference strength rankings at EvanMiya.com: