2025 Team Preseason Projections

Diving into some notable team rankings and projections methodology changes

Preseason team and player rankings are live at EvanMiya.com, and the college basketball season is inching closer!

Here’s a preview of the top 10 teams and players on the site:

Quick Methodology Overview

For those who aren’t familiar, here’s an overview of how the team preseason projections are formulated:

• Projected roster strength - This is by far the most important one. Each player on the roster has a projected Bayesian Performance Rating for the season, which estimates how impactful a player will be on a per-possession basis during the season. There is also an associated minutes prediction model that gives a rough estimate of what a team’s rotation will look like. Combining all rostered players’ projected BPR with predicted minutes gets an estimate of the team’s overall roster strength based on personnel. You can see each team's “Roster Rank” column on the Team Ratings page. The top 10 teams in roster strength are also shown below:

• Team performance in previous seasons - Though this is much less of a factor in a team’s preseason projection, it still does play an important role. Teams that often outperform their projected roster strength in past seasons are likelier to do so in future seasons. Teams with coaching changes are also handled differently from teams with returning coaches. Based on my analysis, when a team changes coaches, their next season's performance correlates very little with how they fared in the previous season. Roster strength is crucially important in these cases.

• Roster continuity - Teams with a higher percentage of returning minutes from the previous season are often slightly better than teams with a lot of roster turnover. This doesn’t play a huge role, but it does move the team projection slightly. I also added an estimate of each team’s percentage of minutes that will be played by returning players since my previous study on roster construction shows that teams who build their rotation more around returning players are more successful than teams with lots of newcomers, even with comparable roster strength.

Top 30 Teams

Let’s look at the top 30 preseason teams without further ado.

It’s not surprising to me in the slightest that Houston and Purdue are the top two teams in my preseason projections. Houston has an insanely good track record over the last couple of years, finishing in the top 4 at EvanMiya.com each of the previous five seasons. Their returning group this year is once again very solid, led by the trio of Milos Uzan, Emmanuel Sharp, and Joseph Tugler. Meanwhile, Purdue has assembled the top-ranked roster in the country, led by the preseason #1 player at EvanMiya.com, Braden Smith, who should be dominant this year.

Duke sits at third, which might surprise some people. Their roster clearly isn’t as talented as last season, but this year’s crop deserves more praise than they are getting. Freshman Cameron Boozer should be in the running for freshman of the year, and my model predicts big sophomore campaigns from both Isaiah Evans and Patrick Ngongba. These two were used in a limited fashion as freshmen but showed enormous promise and will be stepping into much bigger roles. Both land in the top 50 players in the preseason at EvanMiya.com.

Here are some other teams that my model seems particularly optimistic about:

• #5 Michigan boasts the 2nd-best roster in the country behind Purdue. Yaxel Lendeborg is the 2nd highest rated player in the preseason after Braden Smith.

• #8 Illinois has two star returners in Tomislav Ivisic (#13 at EvanMiya.com) and Kylan Boswell (#43), along with a hyped group of incoming talent from Europe. The more I dig into Big T’s numbers from last year, the more I am convinced he will be really special.

• #18 Ohio State might be the team in my top 25 that is the most surprising, but the Buckeyes had a great approach to their roster build this offseason. They return three massive contributors from last year in Bruce Thornton (#6), John Mobley Jr. (#78), and Devin Royal (#94). Getting your biggest players to return is really tough to do in the modern portal era. Thornton may not be the flashiest point guard in the country, but his efficiency as a scorer and playmaker is pretty impressive.

• #25 Vanderbilt once again has a chance to overachieve relative to expectations after being very smart about the players they have recruited this offseason. I was high on Vanderbilt last year (35th in the preseason) and was proven right to be optimistic. We will see if Mark Byington can live up to the analytical hype for a second year in a row.

• #27 Mississippi State is ranked this high in large part because of star point guard Josh Hubbard (#18 in the player ratings). Hubbard is the only guard in the country with a projected points per 100 possessions of over 34 while maintaining a projected turnover percentage under 2.5%. He rarely turns the ball over despite being asked to be the primary scorer and playmaker on the team.

• #28 Cincinnati being this high scares me a little bit, but on paper, the Bearcats have another solid roster. While they don’t have any bona fide stars, they really focused on getting some highly rated defensive players, which should pay dividends on that end of the court.

• #36 Miami has a top 10 incoming transfer class at EvanMiya.com and should be much improved under new head coach Jai Lucas.

On the flip side, here are some teams that my model seems to be down on relative to consensus:

• #13 St. John’s will be led by Zuby Ejiofor (#15 in the player ratings), but my expectations for some of the other key players are lower than most. Bryce Hopkins should be great when healthy, but it’s been a while since he was at his best. My model has some reservations about transfers Oziyah Sellers and Dylan Darling as well.

• #19 Louisville has a very impressive roster, ranked 6th best in the country. However, the expectations are that Pat Kelsey will be just as tremendous in year 2 as he was with an injury-laden roster in his first year at the helm. I certainly think this is a strong possibility, but my model is a little more skeptical. Some of this pessimism can probably be attributed to the Cards finishing outside the top 20 last year, but this could easily be excused due to all the injuries the team dealt with.

• #23 Texas Tech will be led by likely NPOY contender JT Toppin (#3), along with sophomore point guard Christian Anderson (#56), but I have some serious concerns about the roster depth for the Red Raiders. They only have five players ranked inside the top 500 players in the preseason.

• Some other teams my model is lower on include #35 Wisconsin, #43 San Diego State, #46 Virginia, and #48 Washington.

Model Updates

I made some significant improvements to the Bayesian Performance Rating model that guides all player evaluations at EvanMiya.com, which I will dedicate a whole article to in the coming weeks. You will find updated player ratings for every season going back to 2009-10 on the site.

What’s Next?

As we get closer to November, I’ll be posting more preseason content here on my blog as well as on Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok. I also have a new small merch store that you can find a link to on the main site.