Alright, let’s get this out of the way: ranking the top 25 college basketball players for the 2026–27 season right now is absolutely ridiculous. Like, “why are we even doing this in December?” ridiculous. But hey, that’s never stopped anyone from having fun with wild predictions.
The NET Rankings are out, we’re six weeks deep, the AP Top 12 have already picked every potential national champion after 6 weeks for two decades so there is an important sample here. Most teams are roughly a third of the way through their schedules. So yeah—we actually have a decent idea of who’s playing, who’s starting, and what roles players are carving out.
With that in mind, we’re going to go absolutely nuts and look ahead at the returning talent we expect next year. Seniors are out, projected draft picks have been removed based on consensus rankings, and we’ve tossed in a few others we think will declare early anyway. Freshmen signees are included—though several of the top ones haven’t officially committed yet—and we’ve even built in a likely talent pool of top mid-major transfers, potential portal gems, will be and the handful of five-star newcomers who might just shake things up teams will be looking to land in free agency. Strap in. This is speculative, ridiculous, and completely for fun—but that’s exactly why it’s going to be a blast.
This ranking is based strictly on a talent evaluation of the core players expected to return, along with key freshmen who have already signed, such as at Duke. It doesn’t take coaching or other factors into account—just pure roster talent to keep things simple. You’ll notice teams like Houston and Kansas are absent because, at this point, they don’t have projected returners or top-20 impact freshmen. That said, I would expect them to reload, while schools like Colorado State, Colorado, Santa Clara, Boise State, and Saint Mary’s could be at risk of losing players in the transfer portal.
First here are the players we expect to declare for the draft, both through consensus draft boards or our own picks. The money might not be as crazy next year to keep some of these players from moving on like it did Labaron Philon last year for example. Still there will be opportunities for many of these guys to be drafted in the 1st round I would expect them to take if there aren’t 4 to 7 million dollar NIL this year unlike last. If the money does turn out to be less crazy this should also keep the ransferring down from P5 to P5 down some this year as well, meaining we could start to have a little more continuity and will know a little more what to expect looking out.
