With the NBA Draft early entry withdrawal deadline in the rearview mirror, we can now finally take a legitimate look at rankings for the 2025-26 college basketball season.
In recent years, Indiana has had productive offseasons that led to preseason national top-25 rankings and predictions the Hoosiers would finish at or near the top of the Big Ten. Think the Romeo Langford hype ahead of the 2018-19 campaign, or the noise surrounding the transfer haul ahead of 2024-25 as two prime examples.
There seems to be no such national outlook for Indiana this summer. If you like unheralded, no hype, underdog stories, Darian DeVries’ first IU team might just be for you.
If DeVries’ Hoosiers are going to make noise in year one, it will be come as a surprise to many on the national stage.
Mike Miller of the Field of 68 aggregated six recent 2025-26 preseason college basketball top-25s published by well-known national outlets, and Indiana does not appear in any of them. Here’s what that looks like:
Based on these predictions, the outlook for the top of the Big Ten is as follows:
- Purdue
- Michigan
- UCLA
- Illinois
- Michigan State
- Wisconsin
- Oregon
If analytics are more your style, Bart Torvik has published 2025-26 rankings based on prior year data and roster overhauls. That outlet projects IU to be the No. 40 team in the country and No. 11 in the Big Ten. He says the Hoosiers will have the No. 36 offense, and the No. 48 defense.
Of course coaching changes following by complete roster overhauls like we’ve seen with Indiana over the last couple months can be difficult to comprehend. IU does have a national top-10 incoming transfer portal class according to some outlets, but the Hoosiers also lost all of their top contributors from a year ago.
Indiana fans will point to what both the computer models and humans were saying about Curt Cignetti’s first Hoosiers football squad ahead of the 2024 season. They were widely picked to be last in the Big Ten, and ended up in the College Football Playoff. So that’s a legitimate point.
And there are recent examples in college basketball that suggest it is difficult to project an outlook for IU basketball at the moment.
And at this time last summer, Torvik’s model predicted Louisville, a team with a similar roster overhaul and coaching change, would be the No. 89 team in the nation, and they finished No. 25. It predicted another team with a flipped roster and new coach, Michigan, to be the seventh-best team in the Big Ten, and the Wolverines finished tied for second and won the conference tournament.
So while we finally at least have a good sense for rosters for next season, this is no time to panic.
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