This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, divided into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.

This year, we’re also running our first ever subscriber sale, where you can get 25% off an annual subscription by clicking here or at the button just below this paragraph. It’s the perfect chance to join the welcoming Buzzer community and get access to everything we write, all year round. One of us! One of us!

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Today, the Big Ten, which might not have gone bag-for-bag in offseason spending with the SEC but could very easily be the best — or at least the deepest — conference of the 2026-27 season.

The lone national title contender tier

Illinois Fighting Illini

On March 18, 2017, we were sitting in front of a bank of TVs in Bristol, Conn., watching the NCAA Tournament, when the news broke: Brad Underwood had been hired as the next coach at Illinois. We were sitting next to an Illinois fan — and not just any Illinois fan, but John Gasaway, a totemic figure in our own tempo-free understanding of college basketball, and also a friend — and his response was prophetic. He was thrilled. John is reserved, and he practically fist-pumped. He couldn’t have been happier.

We were struck by John’s certainty, but in retrospect it was obvious. Underwood had exceeded expectations every year of his late-blooming head coaching career. He finished 70th, 51st, and 40th in three years at Stephen F. Austin — Stephen F. Austin! — and went to the NCAA Tournament all three times. He took his high-major chance at Oklahoma State, signed a modest contract with an ostensible handshake agreement to raise his pay upon immediate success, was projected to finish 60th in KenPom’s preseason rankings, finished 22nd, went to the tournament, and asked for more (though not that much more) money. Oklahoma State balked. Illinois jumped. And so Underwood became one of the smartest, most opportunistic hires in modern college basketball history. (And, from OSU’s perspective, one of the all-time fumbles.)

Illinois has been good ever since. Underwood had a couple of rebuild years early, but from there — especially at a program without a national title, where Final Fours get treated with epochal reverence, and coming off the Bruce Weber angst and the nondescript John Groce years — the overall standard, not to mention the tactical adaptability and acumen, has been unimpeachable.

Last year’s team was probably his best. It was definitely one of the most efficient offensive teams in modern history, especially once three-star-to-lottery-pick discovery Keaton Wagler fully took over. A big part of Illinois’s ubiquitous top-five rankings in 2026-27 has been about how much of that team is returning: David Mirkovic, Andrej Stojakovic, the Ivisicii, Jake Davis, plus the arrival of five-star guard Quentin Coleman and Providence transfer Stefan Vaaks, an adept Wagler-esque pick and roll operator.

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Given all this, for much of the offseason, we expected the Illini to run the whole thing back. Instead, Underwood is ripping it all up. As The Athletic’s CJ Moore detailed Tuesday, this offseason Illinois assistant coach Tyler Underwood found himself intrigued by the balls-out no-screens offense bubbling in NBA circles (and most successfully deployed last season by the Miami Heat), and figured it might be the best way to get the most out of a new backcourt and Mirkovic’s quirky profile, even if it meant completely changing what just made Illinois the best offense in college basketball:

Illinois finished possessions with a pick-and-roll nearly 40 percent of the time, per Synergy’s tracking. The Illini returned five of their eight leading scorers and, ranked No. 3 in the preseason AP Top 25, are on the short list of national title contenders.

So when Underwood brought the possibility of scrapping last year’s offense and trying something totally different to his father, head coach Brad Underwood…

“I’m always skeptical,” Underwood says. “I think head coaches have to be.”

Still, in the end, Brad agreed. Of course he did. This is his greatest quality as a coach. He is always changing. There is zero intellectual ego in him. He is not an ideologue. If Kofi Cockburn is on the team, he will walk the ball up and dump it in the post. When Cockburn’s gone, he’ll go to a five-out. If Wagler drops in his lap, and spends all summer torturing ball screen coverages, Illinois will happily tack back to 295th in adjusted tempo, letting their teenage savant hunt. Wagler goes pro? Fine. Time to run — and ditch screens altogether.

Knowing Underwood, this will likely also work. It’s looked good in exhibitions so far. (It also seems designed to get the best out of Stojakovic, who is a just-OK shooter but gets to the front of the rim as well as any wing in the sport.) But if it doesn’t work, oh well? Underwood will simply adapt again. Either way, Illinois will be great.

The “thank you, Jeremy Fears” tier

Michigan State Spartans

We remain convinced the Big Ten is going to be a very deep conference this season, at least as far as NCAA Tournament bids are concerned. Beyond Illinois, though, we’re not sure we see another national title contender in here. That is the upper limit we envision for Michigan State: Very good team, tons of retention, lots to like, but entering 2026-27 a clear step below the likes of Duke, Florida, Arizona and Illinois. (And maybe a couple others; your mileage may vary. We really like UConn.)

We might feel differently if Jaxon Kohler was still here. Kohler’s multi-tool usefulness — he was an excellent interior defender and an elite rebounder on both ends, but also by far the best pick-and-pop shooter at his size in college basketball — created new dimensions of space and continuity in Michigan State’s half-court attack. Tom Izzo’s biggest offseason question was how he was going to replace Kohler, or if he could, with an honorable mention to fellow senior (though much more conventional) big Carson Cooper.

Early returns on the replacements are mixed. Against Marquette Sunday, Charlotte center Anton Bonke — the team’s highest-profile transfer — played just three minutes. Freshman center Ethan Taylor was scoreless in 13. Sophomore Jesse McCulloch started, played 17 minutes, and had four points and four rebounds. MSU may have a bit more outside-in perimeter shooting this season, especially if freshman Jasiah Jarvis and sophomore Jordan Scott shoot it like they did against the Golden Eagles. But the center spot, such a force multiplier last season, remains an open question.

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This might sound a little downbeat for invested fans. (Note: We still think this is the second-best team in the league!) For neutrals, though, it’s almost beside the point. Mostly we’re just thrilled Jeremy Fears is still here.

This is the best guard in the sport. He’s also the type of guard — a guy who throws about three or four jaw-dropping assists per game, a guy with such magical vision he can make an all-seeing TV viewer feel slow in the best possible way — that visually captivates. Great scoring is all well and good, but we see great scorers all the time. Every night is a cascade of highlights of shooters and rim finishers. There is something extra special about a guy who passes the way Fears passes. They are rare and sublime.

For a while, it looked like Fears might really go pro. In the spring and early summer, he and his family made it clear they were not merely testing the waters out of obligation — that his return shouldn’t be taken for granted, that people needed to stop patting him condescendingly on the head. A “screw you guys, I really am that good” draft plunge was a non-zero possibility.

We don’t take Fears for granted. We love watching him play college basketball. However this MSU team shakes out, whether the frontcourt functions or not, we are mostly just grateful this dude is still around.

The “strangest post-title season ever?” tier

Michigan Wolverines

Why did Dusty May leave college basketball? This was a sensitive topic in the 2026 offseason, even if the post-August eligibility madness makes it feel like it happened three years ago. What terrible things did it mean about the college game that such a thing could happen?! Everybody, quick, get accusatory and/or defensive! Blame the chaos!

The reigning national championship coach was, like many of his colleagues, clearly a bit exhausted by the rigors of the current job, even if he was one of the best-adapted for it. But May, a genius on a meteoric rise, unknown less than a decade ago, didn’t decide to retire; he left college to coach Cooper Flagg. You don’t need to be desperate to escape your current job to jump at that opportunity.

Whatever the reasons, May’s surprising-but-also-kind-of-not-surprising decision was unprecedented in the modern history of college basketball — put simply, there are no recent examples of a coach leaving college basketball immediately after winning a national title. (It’s pretty much just Larry Brown in the 1980s. Even Rick Pitino waited until 1997, one year after Kentucky’s title, to jump to the NBA.) The same is true for the program May elevated and then left behind. Michigan is in uncharted waters now.

The Wolverines remain in good hands. Mike Boynton was May’s trusted deputy and hand-picked successor, but he also has experience as a high-major coach, and NCAA and program circumstances had as much to do with his later struggles at Oklahoma State as anything else. He is also a renowned defensive coach. Still, even the biggest Boynton believer must acknowledge that May was a generational virtuoso, and that there are maybe two or three other guys in the entire sport — maybe including the NBA, where May is already innovating — at his level. You simply have to factor charts like this in:

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This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, divided into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.

This year, we’re also running our first ever subscriber sale, where you can get 25% off an annual subscription by clicking here or at the button just below this paragraph. It’s the perfect chance to join the welcoming Buzzer community and get access to everything we write, all year round. One of us! One of us!

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Today: The ACC, which last season exited a half-decade of depressing cultural and basketball drift, landed eight teams in the NCAA Tournament, and will look to continue its reputational rehabilitation in 2026-27. Let’s dig in:

The “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” tier

Duke Blue Devils

More precisely: winning in April.

This Duke team is going to win plenty before then, of course. Jon Scheyer’s teams have done so relentlessly as a rule, particularly the past two years, when they cycled through Cooper Flagg and Cameron Boozer, compiled a combined record of 70-7 (!), and were twice among an elite handful of truly dominant teams in two of the most hierarchical college hoops pyramids ever.

Scheyer’s work has been so comprehensive, and his latest team is once again so thoroughly stacked, that it feels like everything that happens between now and the third week of March is kind of beside the point. The Blue Devils are neck and neck with Florida as the preseason national title favorite, which is the same thing we would have acknowledged even before it became clear 17-year-old freshman forward Joaquim Boumtje-Boumtje could do stuff like this right out of the gate:

In the summer, Boumtje-Boumtje was treated almost like a bonus. He was so young, he had two seasons before he could be draft eligible, maybe he would work in slowly and develop as a reserve this season, whatever. Nope! He looks like a skinnier, less physically developed, left-handed Cameron Boozer. Go figure.

It’s borderline unfair, because the rest of the roster was already elite. John Blackwell is going to have a huge season; he shot it so well on huge volume at Wisconsin last year, and you can bet his looks are going to get much cleaner in this Duke attack. Cayden Boozer’s promising freshman campaign was overshadowed by his brother’s (and that mistake against UConn). Cam Williams is one of the most talented prospects in the country, point guard Deron Rippey looks ready to contribute right away, and Bryson Howard would probably play big minutes at 99 percent of the other programs in Division I. Caleb Foster is still here! Patrick Ngongba might be the ACC player of the year! This is ridiculous!

Duke will be the best team in the ACC. Duke will probably be a No. 1 seed. Duke will win its first two or three NCAA Tournament games, probably mostly comfortably. And then Duke will arrive at the true heart of its season, the Elite Eight and beyond, where success will be determined in the matter of a few crucial possessions down the stretch.

That is the only remaining knock against Scheyer: His teams have not executed well in high-leverage moments in Elite Eight and Final Four games. Not even in the tournament, broadly; Scheyer doesn’t have the exact early-upset har-har reputation of Tony Bennett or Jay Wright or even Bill Self before him. It’s about the last few minutes of the last three games. That’s it.

It does not feel particularly fair to boil the success of an entire season to a couple of seconds in March or April — for the slimmest of margins, one bounce of the ball, to determine everything about what came before. Only one team can win. Crazy shit always happens. But those seconds, and what Duke does with them, are the only forecast really worth talking about. We’ll see.

The “no, really, the ACC has multiple Final Four-level teams now” tier

Louisville Cardinals

The question of whether former UNC captain and Chapel Hill Ben and Jerry’s franchisee Seth Trimble will play for Louisville this year is, predictably, no more settled than it was two months ago. Trimble was ruled eligible with a tranche of the five-in-five hopefuls for a while, then he wasn’t, and then, on Friday, got a new temporary restraining order from the Jefferson County Circuit Court saying he was in fact eligible again. The season starts in a couple of weeks. Totally normal stuff!

The good news, for Louisville, is that Trimble was merely the icing on the roster cake — a nice-to-have bonus after most of the real roster work was already done.

In Flory Bidunga, Pat Kelsey and his army of NIL donors made the biggest early splash in the 2026 portal. Bidunga was a one-man defensive wrecking crew at Kansas last season, one of the main reasons Bill Self’s defense held up through all the Darryn Peterson chaos. He is elite at the rim but can also stretch and zero out perimeter ballhandlers; he affects every possession one way or the other. He’s probably the best, or at least the most impactful, defender in the country. The massive sum Louisville paid for him — and the speed with which Bidunga announced his commitment in the spring — suggests that at some point in the winter Kelsey decided the Cardinals needed to massively up their defensive level and would pay whatever it took to do so.

Bidunga is a really good offensive player, too. His sophomore growth from a raw dunker to a patient post operator and kick-out passer was stark. He is a real go-to option now. He also pairs just about perfectly with Iowa transfer Alvaro Folgueiras, a legend of the Hawks’ Elite Eight run. Folgueiras is 6-foot-10, rebounded his own glass, finished efficiently around the rim, but also went 36-of-108 from 3, meaning he won’t overcrowd Bidunga on the block. (Bidunga, for all his strengths, doesn’t seem like a guy you’d necessarily want to use in a trendy two-center lineup; Kansas certainly did not.) Folgueiras lets you split the difference.

From there, Kelsey has assembled another impressive group of guards and wings, albeit with a bit less perimeter shooting than last season: Arkansas transfer Karter Knox, returner Adrian Wooley, Dayton’s De’Shayne Montgomery, maybe Trimble, and Oregon guard Jackson Shelstad.

Shelstad is a swing acquisition. Injury kept him off the floor last season, but in 2024-25 he was 37.9 percent from 3, with lots of those makes off the dribble. He wasn’t remotely an elite distributor in his first two seasons (more of a “everybody look out I’m gonna put my head down and score here” type of lead guard), though he did post a 31.6 assist rate in 12 games last season, which held up against quality opposition. He will have to do a lot of the latter at Louisville. There are so many mouths to feed.

Besides Kelsey’s ability to really elevate a group of talents — Louisville was never better than the sum of its considerable parts a year ago — that’s the only real concern here. A lot rides on Shelstad’s decision-making, and the backcourt feels a little imbalanced, or maybe just overfull. Knox has yet to live up to his potential, got benched at Arkansas last season, and John Calipari didn’t seem particularly desperate to retain him. He will want a big role as a junior, but what if Trimble is cleared? Trimble was on the floor for 35 minutes in Louisville’s exhibition win over Kansas Wednesday (despite some real struggles offensively). Knox played for 12 and had seven points on five shots. This is surely not the level of involvement he envisioned when he relocated in the spring.

Still, when “what if our $3 million fifth-year transfer gets eligible, what will we do then?!” is what counts as a concern, you’re in good shape. Kelsey has fully resurrected Louisville from the Kenny Payne ashes. It’s time to take the next step.

Virginia Cavaliers

Any nostalgic UVa fans concerned that the post-Tony Bennett era would swing too wildly in the opposite cultural direction — that their beloved anachronistic program would become just another halfway house cycling through mercenaries every offseason — must have felt a big wave of relief this spring. A year ago, Ryan Odom built a No. 3 seed from 13 new players. For his latest trick, he kept everybody around.

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This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, divided into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.

This year, we’re also running our first ever subscriber sale, where you can get 25% off an annual subscription by clicking here or at the button just below this paragraph. It’s the perfect chance to join the welcoming Buzzer community and get access to everything we write, all year round. One of us! One of us!

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Today, the SEC, where the supply of roster money is apparently unlimited. (One note: These files are long, so if your email provider cuts off, be sure to click through to the page to read the rest.) Let’s dig in.

The “please don’t freak out about exhibitions” tier

Florida Gators

On Sunday, national title favorite and AP preseason No. 1 Florida lost an exhibition to a Baylor team we just got done projecting as a bottom-half (albeit top-50-ish nationally) Big 12 outfit, which means it’s time to take the very real advice of legendary investor Warren Buffett:

It’s fine. It’s an exhibition game. Everybody’s revving up. Frankly, it could have not been an exhibition game — it could have been the season opener in Rome Nov. 1 — and we wouldn’t have come away all that concerned about Florida. Do you really think Denzel Aberdeen, who went 36.3 percent from 3 on big volume at Kentucky last season, is going to shoot 3-of-17 from the field and 0-of-10 from 3 a lot this season? If so, then sure: panic sell everything right now. Go crazy. If not, take a breath.

(If anything, we came away more impressed with Baylor, particularly Kayden Mingo. If that was real, the Bears are not going to be nearly as underpowered offensively as we surmised even in last week’s preview.)

The fundamentals on Florida haven’t changed. This is the best frontcourt in the country — so good that a year ago Todd Golden converted it to feature three genuine forwards in the lineup almost all the time. The questions then were simple: Could Thomas Haugh be an actual small forward? Would Florida’s spacing get cramped? Could the Gators’ two primary guards, particularly transfers Boogie Fland and Xaivian Lee, handle the ball and make enough perimeter shots without a third viable ballhandler on the floor? Would it matter? Would the output be worth the stylistic squeeze?

We got the answer to all of those questions last season. Florida did not shoot the deep ball well, especially early in the season. Florida turned it over a ton, especially early in the season. And then, gradually, in part because Florida dominated both rims so thoroughly, it all worked anyway: SEC champs, fourth in adjusted efficiency on Selection Sunday, another No. 1 seed. The Gators hammered those three-big lineups basically all the time. They were some of the most efficient in the sport:

If you want to run back some of the same minor concerns about Florida again this season — and they popped up in UF’s loss to Iowa in the tournament, so it’s not like we’re talking about the perfect team here — that’s reasonable. This will look a lot like last year. Similar foibles will resurface. Fland and Aberdeen will once again shoulder a huge responsibility to make up for what Haugh, for all his strengths at the college level, can’t do, especially with both Rueben Chinyelu and Alex Condon on the floor. Still, Aberdeen is an upgrade on the version of Lee Florida got last year (which is to say: not a great one) in basically every sense. (In the one area you might give Lee the nod, passing and hunting plays off the bounce, Aberdeen showed a new aptitude once he settled into the quasi-point guard role at UK last season.) Urban Klavzar will still be coming off the bench, bringing peskiness and shooting. CJ Ingram (who has a back injury at the moment) and Isaiah Brown will push for wing bench minutes again.

That both of the latter are back says everything about Golden’s work here. We’ve talked about his emphasis on retention this spring, how crazy it is both Condon and Chinyelu are back, how much UF dropped to lure Haugh out of the draft. But it’s one thing to stick around for a ton of money and a starring role. Golden wanted — and was able to convince — in-demand bench players to do it all over again. That takes something else entirely. It’s why the Gators are where they are.

The “all of the other good-to-really-good SEC teams in whatever order you prefer” tier

Tennessee Volunteers

This is a strange new challenge for Rick Barnes. When you think about his tenure at Tennessee, you — ok, we — always come back to two things:

1. Stylistic consistency, with an emphasis on defense, rebounding, and brawn, and

2. Veteran program guys

It’s not like Barnes has never used the transfer portal before. He has sprinkled in at least one impact player every season lately: Ja’Kobi Gillespie, Chaz Lanier, Dalton Knecht. All of these guys made Tennessee much better, usually on the offensive end. But that is not this team. This team has two notable returning players, Troy Henderson and DeWayne Brown, who averaged a combined 21 minutes per game last season. That’s it. Otherwise, the Vols are brand new.

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Barnes resorting to this gambit probably says a couple of things. One, that he is prepared for this to be the last season of his career, that he knows he doesn’t have time for a multi-year rebuild and after three straight Elite Eights needs at least one more crack at April basketball. And two, that he really likes the guys Tennessee brought in.

As well he should. Tyler Lundblade and Juke Harris are both elite shooters who are excellent off the ball, as Barnes’s teams tend to operate. Point guard Terrence Hill was remarkably efficient in his sophomore leap season at VCU. (Hill had a 128.3 offensive rating on 25 percent usage and a 28.1 percent shot rate, a 23.8 percent assist rate on low turnovers, and elite shooting splits — he was quietly one of the most incisive guards in the country last year.) Jalen Haralson is a big Buzzer favorite heading into this year; he was forced into an overwhelming role at Notre Dame after Markus Burton’s injury, mostly acquitted himself well, and won’t have to do half as much this season to be a value-add. Dai Dai Ames has turned into a useful high-major rotation guy.

Jalen Washington’s status is up in the air, but in any case stealing him from Vandy was a coup, and he’ll do different stuff to the typically stiffer UT-Barnes big. Miles Rubin is more functional, let’s say, but there are questions about how he’d hold up if Washington wasn’t available — and whether Tennessee’s frontcourt can hold up its usual end of the bargain if not.

Regardless, though, there is a free-flowing, fun offensive team here, a who’s who of technically accomplished offensive players. It’s a type of roster Barnes has never really had, or frankly seemed all that inclined to build. The outcome should be fascinating.

Texas Longhorns

This was the first paragraph of the Colorado preview last week:

With respect, it’s hard to say Colorado is rebuilding, per se, because poor Colorado never really gets a chance to rebuild. Every year Tad Boyle’s teams are better than they probably should be; every year he surfaces at least one elite and unheralded talent; every year that guy (or guys) leaves for the NBA or a higher-paying program; and every year, Tad rolls his boulder, no pun intended, back up the Big 12 hill.

Say hello to the chief beneficiary of Tad Boyle’s latest talent identification and development success: Your 2026-27 Texas Longhorns. Isaiah Johnson burst onto the scene as a freshman in Boulder, even into Big 12 play, where he posted a 119.7 offensive rating on 24.4 percent usage with elite finishing stats and a knack for drawing lots of fouls — 5.2 per 40 — without committing them. He was a three-star prospect when he committed to Colorado; one year later, he was one of the biggest and most well-remunerated talents in the portal. And so Tad wiped the sweat off his brow and glanced upward at his task once more.

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Johnson’s presence is probably the thing we like most about this Texas roster, but that’s a testament to how much we love the player — there’s plenty else to be excited by. UT retained Matas Vokietaitis, who ranks among the most well-suited modern rim-hovering bigs in the college game. (Even if you didn’t watch much Texas last season, you’ll recall Vokietaitis’s 23 and 16 in a first round win against BYU, part of a tournament run that redeemed the Longhorns’ late-season bubble slide.) Next to him will be 6-foot-7 TCU transfer forward David Punch, one of the best multipositional defenders in college basketball and the perfect you-don’t-need-to-run-a-single-play-for-this-guy scrapper to slot in next to a lot of guys used to a lot of touches. Amari Evans and Elyjah Freeman both feel like Sean Miller-at-Arizona wings, at least on that end. The Longhorns couldn’t guard anyone a season ago, especially early, and somehow managed the trick of fouling all the time without turning anyone over. That problem should be solved. (And Mikey Lewis, who should be a shooter and not much more in this league, is passable there too.)

Oh, and in addition to harvesting underappreciated talent from mom-and-pop programs, Miller also went ahead and recruited the No. 1 freshman class in the country. Marcus Spears is the eighth-ranked player in the class, per 247 Sports; Austin Goosby ranks 19th. Both of them (maybe especially Spears) could be amazing right away. What’s crazy about this roster is that neither of them needs to. Miller could have stuck with Matas plus the incomings, backfilled his bench with a couple of lesser-known up-transfers, and still have looked like a threat to win the SEC. Texas almost has more talent than it needs.

This is the exact sort of thing the Longhorns athletics program had in mind hiring Miller. His second Xavier stint was fine, and his hire wasn’t an overwhelming slam dunk in the moment, but the man has a clear track record of using the resources available to elite programs judiciously. (At least, you know, before the FBI gets involved. Every post-DeAndre Ayton year at 'Zona felt like a guy recruiting with a helicopter flying over his house.)

Miller clearly spent a ton on this team. He spent it well.

Alabama Crimson Tide

You know the deal by now, right? Nate Oats puts talented guards, a versatile wing or big or both, and a rim-running center on the floor. He tells them to spread out. He tells them to ballscreen the bejeesus out of each other and whip the ball around. He tells them to shoot a 3 or get to the rim. They do. Alabama is good. Rinse, repeat.

Oats’s success at Alabama is probably best described as singleminded. This can be a bad thing — the way he handled Brandon Miller, his ludicrous defensive justifications for the Charles Bediako fiasco, his demonstrated willingness to be grating it if means his team keeps winning — but it is also what leads to such perennially successful basketball teams. Oats prunes his garden to his own exact specifications. If he seems a little off-putting in the process, a little ritualistic and dogmatic, rest assured it will come out looking beautiful.

Read more

This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, divided into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.

This year, we’re also running our first ever subscriber sale, where you can get 25% off an annual subscription by clicking here or at the button just below this paragraph. It’s the perfect chance to join the welcoming Buzzer community and get access to everything we write, all year round. One of us! One of us!

Subscribe to Buzzer for 25% off

Today: The Big 12, where the expanded and pleasingly basketball-oriented conference continues to feature multiple national title contenders, elite talent, a dash of chaos, and only a couple of programs that don’t seem willing to spend any money on the rosters (and yes, you can tell). Let’s jump right in.

The co-favorites tier

Arizona Wildcats

Tommy Lloyd is the man now. Arizona was so great last season — and has been so good from the moment Lloyd, a longtime Gonzaga assistant with zero head coaching experience, arrived — that Lloyd was the spring’s slam-dunk this-is-our-guy candidate at North Carolina, where hires without family ties are unheard of, and whose interest Lloyd promptly parlayed into a godfather deal to remain in Tucson. Successful college coaches have a long history of effectively outranking their athletic directors; Lloyd might be the only guy who has ever had that explicit power written into his contract.

No surprise, then, that Arizona begins yet another season with national title aspirations. It should be a surprise, but it’s not. Between NBA draft entrants and graduations, Lloyd returns only a fraction of the team that won 36 games a season ago, has huge minutes and production gaps to fill and faces plenty of questions about how that transition will actually work, and yet pretty much everybody (this newsletter included) expects Arizona to be freaking awesome again. It’s good to be the man.

Also good: Having arguably the most impactful two-way player in the Big 12 on your roster. Motiejus Krivas isn’t remotely flashy, and his excellence was easy to lose amid the deluge of Arizona’s versatile dominance last season, but he is one of the prime floor-raisers in the sport — a strong 7-foot-2 interior finisher, rim protector and rebounder. He does everything you’d hope for an elite modern college center, all at an extremely high level.

What’s interesting is how much of all that Krivas will now need to do. The 2026 Wildcats were almost overfull in the frontcourt. Freshman Koa Peat was immediately thrust into high usage, and Tobe Awaka, the best rebounder in the country by some margin, came off the bench. (Awaka once had 18 rebounds in 19 minutes played; he never broke the 1:1 ratio, but it was fun to watch him try.) Combined with attacking guard play and great positional size, Arizona controlled both rims and generated so many easy baskets they could afford to attempt just 26.3 percent of their field goals from 3.

It’s not clear that’s how this Arizona team will function. Ivan Kharchenkov — one of Buzzer’s favorite “you feel good when this guy has the ball” players of the season — was essentially a 6-foot-7 guard. There’s a real chance he will slide down to the four for significant minutes this year. Kharchenkov is great and in line for a sophomore breakout in isolation, but how does that slight smallball tweak actually function (assuming it happens)? Can top-40 freshman Cameron Holmes do similar stuff with slightly less recruiting pedigree? Are there any two-big answers among the relatively unknown newcomers (Ugnius Jarusvicius, Evan Otten, Endurance Aiyamenkhue, Mabil Mawut)?

Hmm. This frontcourt feels like Lloyd always left a big, glaring spot open for Peat to return from the draft, a gamble that didn’t pay off when Peat stayed in and barely snuck in the first round. (A shooting coach is already in the process of destroying Peat’s shot mechanic, it seems.) Five-in-five guy R.J. Godfrey was the answer after the Peat plan didn’t work out, but no one knows if he’ll end up playing.

Those aren’t the only questions, either. Save freshman star Caleb Holt, whom everyone we’ve talked to expects to be really good right away, Arizona’s backcourt recruitment was … well, interesting. UNC transfer Derrick Dixon is a 6-foot-5 point guard who shot 40 percent from 3, more than a few of which came on self-created dribble jumpers. You can see him thriving in a fast-paced, open-floor Arizona attack, especially for a team that could have used a dash more perimeter interest last season. But Dixon also attempted a grand total of 30 2-point field goals last season, about 10 percent of Jaden Bradley’s figure, and was a shockingly bad rim finisher for his size. You can forgive a fan base accustomed to the latter for maybe taking some time to get used to the former. Washington transfer J.J. Mandaquit, another quasi-post-hype freshman gamble, is even less of a sure thing.

Still, this is all nitpicking. It’s more interesting to get into the weeds than just wave your hands and say Arizona is good again, but, reminder: Arizona is good again. The frontcourt depth and guard talent/experience might not compare favorably to last season’s roster, but whose would? Lloyd restored Arizona to an annual title contender and made himself the most powerful man in Tucson in the process, and there is zero reason to expect any meaningful detours in 2027.

Houston Cougars

Speaking of “waving your hands and just saying a team is good again,” it’s always helpful, this time of year, to take a step back and take stock of exactly what Kelvin Sampson has done:

Just completely effing ludicrous. Since COVID, Sampson’s “worst” team finished fifth in adjusted efficiency and went to the Final Four. The level of analytic trust is off the charts: You could tell us Sampson was going to challenge himself by building an entire roster of DIII benchwarmers, or that he’d decided to dedicate an entire season to Norman Dale by fielding just four players in every game, and we’d still have a hard time ranking the Cougars outside the Big 12’s top third.

That is the preface to every Houston preview every season. Houston is always Houston. Houston is always great. The details sort of don’t matter — right up to the point that they do.

Last season’s details ended up mattering. The Cougars returned a big chunk of the team that nearly beat Florida in national title game, but the parts it did not return, especially J’Wan Roberts, ended up being critical. After JoJo Tugler was unable to recreate Roberts’ interior offense — Tugler is many things, but “savvy post operator” is not one of them — Houston abandoned that concept altogether, and instead became an almost entirely outside-in offensive attack. Milos Uzan’s shooting numbers dipped drastically, Kingston Flemings was brilliant but usually stopped well short of the rim, and even freshman big Chris Cenac preferred facing up from range. The result was way too many possessions that ended meekly with Uzan dribbling out the shot clock, and a sudden dip into unrecognizable analytic territory, as Basket Under Review’s Brian Rauf noted of late:

Houston usually sits somewhere in the middle of the power-conference pack in paint scoring and getting to the foul line. Last season it did neither well, finishing around 45 paint points and just under 25 fouls drawn per 100 possessions. That put the Cougars in the lower-left quadrant next to Pitt, Creighton and South Carolina, which is not company Houston usually keeps on offense.

Rauf dug up that stat as context for what comes next, which is to say: Houston really needs Dedan Thomas to be really good, especially at the things Houston did so poorly last year.

The signs are there. Thomas was an elite pick and roll player at LSU last season, one who thrived driving into the teeth of a defense, and one whose assist/turnover rates (43.4% and 11.4%, respectively) were so mind-blowing as to compare favorably to Jeremy Fears. A lot of lob dunks for Tugler should be in the offing. The problem, though, is that Thomas did all of that incredible work in the first 16 games of the season, when LSU was usually playing bad opposition, whereas Thomas was merely solid and not nearly as efficient during the first 58 games of his career at UNLV.

The Cougars desperately the LSU Thomas to be real. If it’s not, it’s hard to see where else the attacking edge will come from. We can safely assume Houston isn’t going to thrust Tugler into the ill-fitting Roberts role again, and Kent State transfer Delrecco Gillespie appears to be more of a “just be long and guard people and grab rebounds” type of guy, at least in the Big 12. Returning wings Mercy Miller and Chase McCarty were both very efficient in around 28 percent of available minutes last season, and McCarty in particular shot the ball well, but neither guy is likely to create. Purdue Fort Wayne guard Corey Hadnot is worth shouting out; he was a high-usage scorer who got to the rim often, even if he looks like little more than a bench spark in this context.

Either way: That’s a lot to put on Thomas’s shoulders. If he’s truly as good as he was when LSU was beating up on overmatched low-majors last season, then the Cougars have their latest Jamal Shead, at least offensively. If Thomas is more like his UNLV version — well, good news, folks: It’s still Houston. It might be the best defensive team in the country again, because those are the table stakes, a team that rebounds everything and plays harder every night than it should be physically possible to play. That is still an amazing floor, as it always is under Sampson, but the difference between “another great Houston team” and “Houston is our pick to win it all” is always down to the shotmaking and offensive creativity — or lack thereof.

The “this could be too low or too high, honestly not sure” tier

Iowa State Cyclones

Tamin Lipsey looms. For opponents — specifically opposing guards, but also opposing coaches — is there any more terrifying five-in-five eligibility decision in the country than Lipsey? Is there any guy fellow college guards want to be ruled definitively ineligible more than this? He’s like the really talented guy at your pickup run that always seems to end up defending you, and then embarrassing you. Go away, Tamin! Guard someone else! Leave us alone!

Lipsey’s eligibility question feels more pronounced than many. If he’s allowed to play this year — and it’s starting to feel more and more unlikely with the five-and-five guys, but we’ll see — then our belief in this Iowa State position goes way up. If not, T.J. Otzelberger has a much more difficult job on his hands, albeit one he’s proven himself plenty capable of.

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This is Better Know a Conference, Buzzer’s annual preview series. Between now and Nov. 2, we’ll be writing the detailed stories — a mix of roster breakdowns and overarching narratives, broken down into silly tiers — of the 2026-27 season to come.

We’re also running our first ever subscriber sale, where you can get 25% off by clicking here or at the button just below this paragraph. It’s the perfect chance to join the Buzzer community and get access to everything we write, all year round. Come on down!

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The Big East is going to get better. The reasons for this are simple, and we wrote about them in detail over the summer, so it’s probably best to use that post as a primer rather than restate the obvious again …

… but it is, nonetheless, the story here. The Big East’s unique position in college basketball has always felt tenuous. Since it formed in 2013, the leftovers of an old Big East whose key members decided football mattered more banding together in solidarity, the post-schism league has been a yearly outlier, an experiment: Can you survive, and thrive, as a hoops-only power conference?

Every trend in college athletics suggested the answer was no. But the Big East made it work, and then became reliably fun and culturally indispensable along the way, and now — thanks to the House settlement and the guaranteed share of revenue (most) Big East teams don’t need to allocate to greedy Division I football — can suddenly compete with the most moneyed conferences in the sport.

The result is a conference with more potential tournament teams than at any point in the past few seasons. For as enjoyable as the Gus Johnson/Bill Raftery broadcasts always are, for as much as we enjoy John Fanta’s Twitter spaces with lunatic Providence fans, the league has managed more than three tournament bids just once in the past three seasons. A year ago, its bubble prospects were decided earlier than most. This year should be much, much different. Let’s get into it:

The national title contender tier (singular)

Connecticut Huskies

In the past four NCAA Tournaments, the Connecticut men’s basketball team has won 17 games and lost two. One could read this piece of information without any further context and it would still be mind-blowing; you don’t have to be a logician to know there are a couple of national titles implied in there somewhere. But even the losses are crazy. Both of them were inflicted by the respective tournament’s eventual champion. Both opponents were No. 1-seeded juggernauts. Both games were so much closer than anyone expected.

Point being: Even in the defeats — in the most disappointing moments of a peerless four-year run, and down to the tiny possession-by-possession margins that decide them, even in the desperate scraping and scrapping against the overwhelming force of Michigan last April — there has been nothing one could use to reasonably criticize Dan Hurley. Even when they lose, you come away impressed.

So it is no surprise to see the Huskies atop the Big East preview tier/rankings yet again. This is the world we have lived in for a while, as it seems we will for the foreseeable future. (It might be slightly more of a surprise that St. John’s, not to mention the rest of a juiced-up top third of the league, feels a bit further behind than usual.) This has been the most comprehensively competent program, both tactically and strategically, for college basketball’s past half-decade, and nothing about the macro picture before the 2026-27 season suggests that’s about to stop.

With his typical combination of retention, development, and a dash of the portal, Hurley has put together another fantastic squad, the kind that causes internal debates about who, exactly, the best player actually is. Buzzer’s first instinct all offseason has been to anoint Braylon Mullins, the breakout sophomore candidate with the perfect jumper who eschewed the lottery in June, who looks visibly capable of averaging 24 points a night. But is that disrespectful to Silas Demary, who was already an all-Big East first teamer and one of the best defenders in the league? Maybe a little bit!

And then there’s Na’jai Hines, whose immediate defensive dominance carried Seton Hall on that end of the floor last year, and who is already probably a better defender than the post-Hurleyfied peak version of Tarris Reed (even if Hines lacks a lot of the auto-bucket technical skills that made Reed so potent under the rim offensively). Duke transfer Nik Khamenia won’t be Alex Karaban in all kinds of ways — no one would be — but in terms of replacing that profile of player, among any transfer available in the spring of 2026, could UConn’s staff have possibly done any better?

As usual, the Huskies also have one elite freshman coming through. Five-star wing Colben Landrew will likely play meaningful Mullins-esque minutes off the bench, with a view to a starring role later in the season and beyond. He probably offers more raw talent and upside than Jayden Ross, but Ross was also quietly better than you probably remember (119.8 offensive rating, a 2.7 steals rate, 62.4 percent true shooting, 25-of-64 from 3) and has the advantage of veterancy in a program obsessed with it. And all of this is before mentioning Solo Ball, a star of last year’s team, who thanks to the five-in-five rule can return from his injury midseason without burning his last year of eligibility. Nice little bonus there.

(We should also probably mention Nils Machowski here. Machowski, who shot the lights out at Wofford last season, also has a reputation as a plus perimeter defender. He won’t need to play a ton to be happy, but will have a chance to be really useful, especially until Ball returns.)

If there is one minor flaw in this roster build, it’s in the frontcourt, where UConn lost incumbent center Eric Reibe to USC. Keeping Reed’s multi-year backup around to play behind yet another transfer was never going to happen, especially with all the money being spent on centers in the portal, but the departure means Hines has to a) stay on the floor a lot and/or b) former Stanford reserve center Oskar Giltay has to soak up minutes if he can’t. UConn has never bought in on the ultra-big or two-center lineup trend of the past couple of seasons, and doesn’t look likely to now. But having the 6-foot-8 Karaban’s mix of size and intelligence and floor-stretching was a cheat code that made such trend-chasing unnecessary. Even in the title game, Karaban had 11 rebounds, eight defensive, against the freaking Michigan frontcourt, all while attempting 10 3s on the other end. UConn will miss him every night — but especially against the very best teams in the sport.

Good news: UConn is one of the very best teams in the sport. Whatever qualms you have on the margins, you can bet on Hurley to buffer them out, and in any case there aren’t many qualms to have. This is the best roster in the Big East by some margin. It is almost impossible to improve on a 17-2 postseason record in four years. This group will enter next March fully expecting to pull it off.

The Carl Johnson tier

St. John’s Red Storm

In short:

This may seem like a counterintuitive emotion to have about previewing St. John’s, at least these days. The Red Storm are, after all, 36-4 in the Big East in the past two seasons, consecutive outright conference champs. After years of relative irrelevance, Red Storm fans have an icon as their coach and an obvious wealth of NIL money to spend. These are the glory days.

It’s just that, despite the success and the immaculate vibes, for the past couple of seasons previewing St. John’s has been tricky. It has been an exercise in reconciling what feel like obvious roster holes and limitations — real doubts about whether Rick Pitino and his staff have maximized the money they’ve been given to spend — with the assurance that whatever the problems, Pitino will fix them, and fix them so well you forget about them altogether by, like, January.

Never has this been more the case than right now.

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But a tweet that quoted it made me spit out my Diet Coke:

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A few weeks back, when a reader asked if I could change one thing to “fix” college basketball, my answer was unequivocal: I would wave a wand and make injunctions go away. This was mostly a joke, an excuse to quote Jim Downey in One Battle After Another, and not a realistic desire. Even in the hypothetical, asking the US judicial system to stop functioning seems extreme.

Still: If I could, I would.

It may say something about how world has changed — about college sports, obviously, but also about our society, and the people who wield power within it, and whether institutional trust is being earned — that right now I am at least as annoyed by our judiciary’s treatment of the NCAA as I am by the NCAA itself.

The NCAA is supposed to be the villain. This used to quite obviously be the case. For decades, colleges clung to their outdated, romantic, exploitative athletics model. Amateurism failed long before it was abandoned. The NCAA was somehow simultaneously overzealous and careless at enforcing its own rules. It nitpicked the dumbest shit. It took years to make even the smallest, most minor, most reasonable change. It had to be dragged wailing and thrashing, by forces outside its control, into the diminished but still crucial place it now occupies.

The NCAA’s post-NIL role should be simple but essential: It should be the coordinating technocracy responsible for registering participants and crowning annual champions (college football obviously excepted). Rulemaking should be almost entirely focused on the game itself. The org’s sudden dearth of bureaucratic responsibility — no more transfer destination restrictions, byzantine waiver appeals, impermissible benefits, IARP, no more chasing kids and their childhood AAU coaches around to find out if they received free flights to a recruiting visit or texted a coach’s Palm Pilot too many times in one month — feels like chaos to some. It feels like a karmic organizational neutering to others. But it should be a relief. All those years, so much nonsense. So many hearings and committees! So much waste. Pare it all down, strip out all the Victorian concern-trolling about players earning money they deserve, and what are you left with? Who is a college athlete. Who is not. Who gets into the tournament. Who doesn’t.

Focus. Clarity of purpose. Anyone who has worked multiple freelance gigs at once, and then shifted to a full-time job, knows this feeling. It feels weird at first. But then it feels great.

The NCAA’s five-in-five rule change was the organization’s first real day on this new job, whether Charlie Baker & Co. realized it or not. It was also sensible policy. Here’s when your clock starts. Here’s when it ends. The whole idea was simplicity. Plain language, obvious parameters. No more quasi-former-pros trying to poke holes in opaque bylaws every time someone flamed out in the G League.

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Even the decision to put the rule in place immediately, and cut off the class of 2022, was defensible, at least as these things go. Either you set the cutoff now, and face a likely lawsuit from just-graduated players seeking a fifth year they didn’t get to have, or you set it next summer, probably get sued again anyway, and drag out the mess for another 12 months. This is the same reason, presumably, the NCAA seems so keen to fight this current torrent of legal actions, even as the losses pile up. Law firms have dedicated college sports practices now. The litigious appetite can’t be sated. It must be defeated. At some point you have to stop marching and pick the hill you’re going to hold.

I don’t know whether that was the right decision or not. All I know is that the NCAA can’t seem to do anything — even to actively embrace its narrower mandate and make a simple rule about who is allowed to play college basketball — without a legal disaster ensuing.

On Aug. 10, when US District Court for the District of Colorado Judge Charlotte N. Sweeney denied the NCAA’s stay and kept the 2022 class eligible (for now), she said the organization “is in a bind of its own making” and “made its own choice which comes with its own consequences.” It’s not entirely clear what the NCAA should have done otherwise, or why it deserved to be scolded from the bench. For making a rule? A rule about which players are allowed to play?

For decades, you could look at university brass and ask why they couldn’t be better. Now: What can the NCAA do?

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Earlier this week, my former colleagues at The Athletic dropped what the kids these days might refer to as a truth nuke.

Having spent a weekend anonymously polling coaches at Peach Jam, asking those coaches to estimate the average NIL spends of conference competitors, Brendan Marks and CJ Moore returned with figures that were somehow both eye-watering and — based on everything everyone in the sport was saying all spring — entirely plausible, if not outright predictable:

With the caveat that 25 coaches represent a modest sample size, and without access to Evan Miyakawa’s stakeholder-facing database of NIL valuations (which would seem to broadly support the numbers CJ and Brendan got back), this was fascinating. A lot stuck out. The sheer speed of growth, first of all. Everyone is spending more. A lot more. The SEC was already out front last summer, and appears to have gone completely insane since. A one-year doubling of roster spending? An average cost of $18 million per roster, in a league where so much of total NIL investment is inherently hoovered up by football? Is the money just unlimited?

(The recent rhetoric at football media days about the quality of the SEC’s primary sports product, and whether it has been surpassed in investment and results by the Big Ten — and Curt Cignetti’s response to SEC complaints Thursday, which were very funny — makes all this doubly interesting. SEC: basketball league?!)

The ACC’s relative financial stagnation is also intriguing and believable. It matches the overall vibe of the modern ACC, or at least many of its members, where aggressive athletic investment often feels begrudging. It is also a bigger conference with vastly diverging types of basketball programs and fan bases, ranging from utterly obsessed bluebloods to, well, this. Some of those schools are going to drag down your average. Anyway, the key word here is “relative.” A 40 percent year-over-year increase is still a lot! If you’d predicted that a year ago, we would have said the league was really about to amp things up. And it is! It’s just that everyone else is apparently doing more.

None of these were the biggest takeaway, though. The most glaring whoa-wait-WHAT?! in this list is obviously the Big East — where the league’s prophesied fiscal revolution has officially come to pass.

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In the matter of one calendar year, the Big East has gone from spending the least of college hoops’ power five conferences to more than anyone but the ESS EEE SEE. This was the foretold effect of the House settlement and the introduction of revenue-sharing: Without football to worry about, Big East teams could distribute a much larger slice of their guaranteed $21 million-ish revenue pie to basketball. They can also, as coaches noted to The Athletic, offer the certainty of directly funded deals with players that don’t risk getting blown up by the NIL Go clearinghouse, which has rejected $90 million worth of NIL contracts in the last 12 months.

None of this is new — it played at least some role in Kevin Willard figuring Villanova was a better job than once-and-future sleeping giant Maryland in March 2025 — but it is nonetheless stunning to see it swiftly play out.

Lest this still sound farfetched to you, none other than St. John’s coach Rick Pitino helpfully backed up The Athletic’s estimations. On Wednesday, Pitino told NJ.com that “Marquette, Providence, Xavier, Connecticut, St. John’s and probably Georgetown have all spent probably more” than $14.5 million on their rosters.

Pitino’s predictions — that he’d pick Marquette, which never got close to making the 2026 tournament, to win the league, and that Xavier, Providence, and Villanova would all compete for the league title — are classic offseason Pitino, in that the guy is always delivering one hot take or another this time of year. Yet they also ring as broadly true, or at least speak to the overall lift in quality you see the more you dig in to this league.

(You know, except Georgetown. More on which below.)

The revelation of the Big East’s deep pockets happened, for me, just after this week’s podcast conversation with Matthew Winick, whose annually incredible offseason transfer portal rankings sheet was noticeably positive about a bunch of these programs, and really the league as a whole.

Scrolling down Winick’s rankings — before you even dive into his analysis of individual players and grades and overall team fit — left one with the impression that pretty much every Big East team needed to level up this spring did so. You can just go right down the list:

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The Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman did a very funny thing Tuesday night. Just after the first round of the 2026 NBA Draft ended — and ended disappointingly for three players in particular — Goodman named the agencies and specific agents who were representing those players:

In one sense, Jeff was merely reporting facts. But he wasn’t just naming; he was shaming. Mistakes were made. As any reader of this newsletter knows, the stakes for a star leaving behind the college game in 2026 are massive. If you’re one of these guys, and you stay, you have millions of dollars waiting for you. If you go, well, you never know. Jeff’s implication was obvious: The three players in question did not receive the best, most financially sound advice — and at the worst and most obvious moment in the history of the sport.

(Jeff also later explained that he thought, in a world where agents want their names attached to every free agency news story and trade and even NIL deal that breaks on Twitter, turnabout was fair play. And you know what? He’s right!)

Mercifully, Isaiah Evans and Meleek Thomas were drafted almost immediately in Wednesday night’s second round (Evans went 33rd overall, Thomas 34th). Those outcomes were still huge letdowns, relative to first round pre-draft expectations, but they were at least in the realm of what everyone involved would have understood was possible throughout the process. There’s always a risk.

There was no such mercy for Henri Veesaar.

The second round of the modern NBA draft is not exactly must-see TV for the average sports fan, especially during a domestically hosted World Cup. Even this year’s first round felt oddly perfunctory, short on surprises: The four best players went in the first four picks, the guys expected to follow them mostly landed in place, the biggest riser from pre-draft expectations was drafted by the team that just hired a coach who led him to a national title (which, more on Dusty May below), and Koa Peat sneaking in at the very last pick of the first round was arguably the most suspenseful thing that happened all night.

Then Veesaar became the thing. He was the closest this draft had to a green room ghost — the guy who keeps drifting further and further down the list, the guy everyone pities, the star student who somehow flubs every job interview until it starts to get sad, the guy who will undoubtedly remember this most pivotal two days of his life with a panicked pit in his stomach.

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There are caveats about Veesaar’s situation, things that make it less cut and dry than the “this unfortunate child was hoodwinked out of millions” narrative that accompanied his descent this week.

But still: Veesaar’s draft experience was the most glaring example yet of the suddenly drastic downsides — in 2026, in this college basketball landscape, more than ever, and for the foreseeable future, too — of leaving college when you’re not quite sure.

The NBA rookie scale has lingered over every meaningful stay-or-go decision of the 2026 college basketball offseason, beginning with Thomas Haugh’s sudden and spectacular return to Florida in the spring. At the time he announced, Haugh was considered a fringe lottery pick, and the NIL deal he signed with Florida was educated-guessed at somewhere in the $7-$8 million range.

A quick glance at the rookie scale (via Sportrac) makes it clear Haugh — even at a relatively lofty NBA draft projection — was actually profiting from staying in Gainesville for the next 12 months:

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Oh, and if that wasn’t enough content for you, here’s this week’s obligatory podcast plug. It was a fun one!

(You can also subscribe on Spotify, Apple, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Go leave us a review! You know, if you want to! No pressure.)

OK, question time.

If you could only choose one thing to “fix” college basketball, what would that thing be? — Kyle

This is a convenient way in to this discussion, but it’s also just true: I want Brendan Sorsby to never happen again.

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I want temporary injunctions gone. I want schools, coaches and players filing lawsuits to evade the application of simple, sensible NCAA rules — you can’t play if you’re not eligible; you can’t play if you have bet on your own sport, let alone your own team — to lose this exploit for good. I want a permanent injunction against temporary injunctions. I want it all to stop.

Otherwise, really, what is there to complain about? College basketball is better than at any point in my adult life. The product is incredible. The level is so high. Roster-building strategy and in-game tactics are more diverse and innovative than ever. Top players are staying in school; top international prospects are flooding in; talent is everywhere. I’ve never been particularly bothered by players making money, even lots of it, or transferring, even every year. NIL, for all of its weirdness, has mostly been a clever and effective quasi-workaround to the problem of revenue-sport athletes deserving to be paid handsomely and athletics departments needing to fund the crew team, too.

Plenty of fans’ mileage varies on this stuff, and I get it. Nothing’s perfect. But — for me — it’s better.

Nor do I mind the NCAA’s recent proposals on eligibility rules, even if this summer’s new international guidelines seem a little too strict at face value. The organization is doing its best in a challenging climate, and as long as the members all agree to a set of broadly reasonable rules, hey, fine.

Which is why the injunction madness drives me (and, far as I can tell, literally everyone else who likes college sports) completely insane. Charles Bediako was ineligible by NCAA rule. A random local judge told the NCAA “actually, um, I think your rules are wrong,” and so, just like that, Bediako got to play. Then another judge disagreed, and Bediako was immediately ineligible again. The latter decision was a relief — all’s well that ends well — but the entire spectacle should never have happened in the first place.

The Sorsby case was Bediako on steroids. This time, rather than some obscure, cheesecloth eligibility requirement, Sorsby had violated a fundamental, existential cardinal rule of all competitive athletics: You can’t gamble. No real league in any sport in any country in the world allows this. Nowhere does it go unpunished. No serious person believes that the legality of gambling or the existence of its advertisements are excuses for the participants to jeopardize the integrity of the competition. Sorsby obviously couldn’t play another season of college football. No right-thinking person could have disagreed.

But a judge did. One judge. One guy. That was all it took.

If there was any positive to come out of this mess, it was the speed and extent to which college athletics’ immune system attacked the Sorsby virus. The NCAA filed its own counter, of course. Schools and ADs across the country threatened to boycott Texas Tech. But the biggest move came from the 15 other members of the Big 12. Outraged, they refused to stand by Sorsby’s new benefactors (who grew more obviously desperate as the pressure mounted). Nor did they throw up their hands and play helpless when threatened by the Texas Attorney General. Rather, they enlisted prestigious firm Sidley Austin to seek a creative but apparently legally sound declaration that the league (duh) had to be able to enforce its own rules.

College sports lawyer Tom Mars — not exactly the NCAA’s greatest advocate down the years — summarized it colorfully:

One day later, Sorsby was expelled from the corpus. He entered the NFL supplemental draft. Tech turned tail. This was an encouraging end to the saga, in so far as it became clear that schools and leagues have ways to effect common sense beyond shrugging, rolling over and begging for Congress to put on a cape. Social pressure works. Ostracizing works. There are always levers to push.

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Of course, this shouldn’t have to happen. Leagues waging legal holy war against their own rogue members every time a lower-court judge makes a wild decision — this is not sustainable. Dan Wetzel has it right: Instead of trying to roll a sweeping do-everything bill up a steep legislative hill, Congress could do the world of college sports much more good by keeping things simple:

College sports is now unable to determine who can play and for how long, or even whether it can enforce basic standards on the third-rail issues such as sports wagering.

There are currently multiple efforts in Congress designed to “save” college sports or “preserve” college sports. They are sprawling bills, complicated and filled with pet projects and straw man arguments. As such, none of them stand much of a chance.

As the battle for sweeping reform churns on, college sports needs to push for a so-called skinny bill designed to address the items that almost everyone agrees on: mainly eligibility and enforcement free from judicial interference.

Call it the Stop Suing the NCAA Over Dumb Shit Act of 2026. It could be like three sentences long.

It’s a pipe dream. But if I was granted the power to wave a wand and change one thing about college basketball, that would be it. No. More. Injunctions.

(Oh, and the NCAA Tournament. I’d make it 64 teams. Definitely not 76. And conference realignment: I’d rewind that by about 20 years, give or take. But yeah. Mostly it’s the injunctions.)

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I know the dust still hasn’t completely settled yet from the portal and whatnot, and discussions about next season haven’t begun in earnest, but what transfer and/or returning player do you think wasn’t discussed enough or flew under the radar? — Ross

Maybe it’s just me, but I continued to be surprised by the relative dearth of information about, and apparent interest in, Robert Miller III. As I noted in the latest portal reactions update, Miller is the only player in Evan Miyakawa’s top 50 transfer prospects list still. That was nine days ago. It’s mid-June. Miller still hasn’t made a decision. What’s more, nobody seems to be tracking his recruitment (or lack thereof?) all that closely. Google News is eerily quiet.

The scuttlebutt has long suggested Miami is the likely destination, but why the delay? Why are there so few stories? Where are the tweets with graphics edits? Why aren’t the local message board site writers covering teams who still need functional big guys penning 500-word stories about Miller’s potential impact? This is the last top 50 player of the 2026 portal! And he’s a big! In 2026!

Weird.

Still, Miller isn’t the answer. Buzzer’s most underrated/under-discussed transfer of 2026 is … drum roll, please … and the award goes to …

… Connecticut center Najai Hines!

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Hello friends. Lot going on right now, huh?

The NBA Finals are ferocious and captivating. The US-2026 World Cup has begun, and our pre-tournament ambivalence and cynicism is already melting away. School’s out for summer. The pool is open. The draft is 12 days away.

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One of Buzzer’s very first posts, all the way back in June 2023, was a nominal ode to Will Wade. After years of drawn-out NCAA enforcement bureaucracy, the former LSU coach had just been punished for making those legendarily strong ass offers in Baton Rouge.

The whole thing was hilarious. By 2023, of course, the NIL era had already gone into overdrive. The very thing Wade was being sanctioned for — funneling cash to talented basketball players — was now the prime roster-building method in college sports. Yes, Wade had cheated the rules of his era, but like Kelvin Sampson being unable to put down the Palm Pilot stylus a few years before the NCAA stopped limiting coaches from messaging recruits, it was hard to take the violations remotely seriously in retrospect. Wade would retrench for a year or two at McNeese before returning to a high-major world that craved, rather than shunned, his particular set of skills. This gauche striver, college basketball’s Tom Ripley, would be embraced into the elite once and for all.

Obviously, Wade would thrive. Obviously, he would find professional peace.

Neither of those things has happened. Instead, Wade did a one-year stopover at NC State, where a flashy but ultimately flimsy squad underperformed expectations, and where the highlight — other than a blowout win over an injured UNC team — was probably an offseason Jimmy V photoshoot most Wolfpack fans now detest. Before April, Wade landed at a private airport in Baton Rouge, a shamelessly predictable homecoming that said everything about just how much college sports have changed.

And then a strange thing happened: Wade didn’t sign any players.

After the 2026 portal opened, as moneyed competitors started hoovering top-100 transfers, LSU just … didn’t do anything. For weeks Wade’s roster was effectively empty. Few high-profile programs, or at least high-profile coaches, stood so pat. The silence was eerie.

Then, eventually, the plan became clear: Wade was going to use his first LSU roster to flip the bird to the NCAA, and the rest of the sport, one more time.

At the risk of playing armchair psychologist, how else do you explain it? R.J. Luis is a professional basketball player! Under current NCAA rules — the same ones that held up when Nate Oats tried to ram Charles Bediako down the sport’s throat last winter — he has zero eligibility. He left St. John’s, stayed in the draft despite knowing exactly how much money he was likely giving up (and having the entire world tell him he was making a bad decision at the time, by the way), has signed multiple NBA contracts, and is apparently planning to play college basketball at LSU next season anyway. He obviously can’t play college basketball at LSU next season. But Wade is going to make the NCAA go through all this anyway.

There are four players on LSU’s current projected roster that make sense as potential college basketball players: Abdi Bashir (Kansas State), Mo Dioubate (Kentucky, where it didn’t work out), Divine Ugochukwu (Michigan State) and Austin Nunez (UTSA). Assuming Luis won’t be eligible — and there is, again, no reason he ever would be — the rest of LSU’s 2026-27 chances rely entirely on a raft of vaguely eligible international players to whom Wade has since promised Bayou Traditions donors’ cash.

Point guard Yam Madar — who was born in 2000, drafted by the Boston Celtics in 2020, and has played high-level EuroLeague ball for several years — was reported by an Israeli publication to have made a $5 million “agreement” with LSU. Specious on all fronts; it’s unclear whether Madar will be eligible, and if he is, for how long. (His military service may qualify him for an age-based eligibility carveout.) Saliou Niang, an international prospect who has never played college basketball before, and thus should probably be eligible, was nonetheless drafted 58th overall by the Cavaliers in 2025. Internationals Brice Dessert (born: 2003), Marcio Santos (2002), and Michael Ruzic (2006, hallelujah, but also a guy who played real minutes in Spain’s top league) are all on the squad. It is unclear to this publication which of these players, if any, are definitely able to suit up next season.

So. Either Will Wade …

1. Sort of messed up his first LSU build, despite hiring noted domestic recruiting bagmen Johnny Jones and Rick Stansbury to his staff, and then got a bit desperate, or

2. Is trolling.

The result is likely somewhere in the middle. Either way, it’s not good — and, unlike when Wade was punished for cheating a couple years before it was no longer cheating, also isn’t particularly funny.

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The big problem is this: LSU’s roster strangeness has played out against a backdrop of ongoing NCAA eligibility uncertainty, an atmosphere that begs for self-leadership. Charlie Baker’s fast-tracked five-in-five proposal looks set to streamline the current inscrutable method by which some elder international players (and former fringe NBA draftees) seem to be granted eligibility, but the NCAA can’t do anything to address any of the problems people have with the talent pool if coaches keep trying to legally puncture it to their own advantage.

Another fun wrinkle — and to add to the confusion, organizationally self-inflicted this time — the NCAA is apparently in the process of “modernizing” its guidance on international players, which it distributed to schools May 8, as SI’s Kevin Sweeney detailed last week:

The guidance … lays out updated preenrollment eligibility requirements largely surrounding compensation and professional team involvement. How aggressively the requirements will be enforced is unclear, but they lay the groundwork for the NCAA to push back significantly on professional players in Europe and other top international leagues enrolling in college.

In part, the guidelines state that prospective student-athletes who “entered an agreement with, competed on or received compensation from a team that participates in a league with minimum compensation that exceeds actual and necessary expenses” will not have their college eligibility reinstated. The document lists MLB, NBA, NFL, Premier League and WNBA as examples of such leagues, but other top basketball leagues globally could also qualify.

It’s unclear how many international guys this would affect. We’ve heard different views. The vast majority of the players who have flooded into the US game are not compensated at their clubs remotely as well as they would be in high-major leagues, which is why the influx is happening in the first place. (This is how Nate Oats always knowingly misdirected his Bediako argument, when he tried to sell the idea that Alabama’s competitors were signing millionaire mercenaries by the dozen.) But there are big, important leagues that pay above the NCAA’s new threshold, and if the rules are applied strictly regardless of individual player status or compensation, they could significantly change the roster-building meta in seasons to come. (Jonathan Givony said the NCAA was making clear “international players are no longer welcome in the college game.” Seems bad.)

It’s equally unclear how quickly the organization would enforce these rules, and what impact that would have on the season to come. It would be pretty damn harsh if rosters built on contemporary guidance are thrown into flux in the same offseason. You can’t blame Wade, or any other coach, for not hewing to this guidance a month before it existed.

But still: the NCAA is at the very least interested in drawing a line between a 19-year-old developmental prospect who got a few games for his club’s first team and the well-paid 23-year-old professional starter for a EuroLeague outfit. This is not surprising, because this is what coaches complain about all the time. The latter profile clearly bothers the vast majority, has fostered confusion and disdain among fans, and it has created the rhetorical space for selfish whataboutery every time a new Bediako tries to sue the NCAA out of enforcing its own membership’s rules.

(There is also, now, the matter of the Protect College Sports Act, which US Senators Maria Cantwell and Ted Cruz unveiled Wednesday. It is a sweeping piece of legislation that would codify the NCAA House settlement and a five-year eligibility standard, restrict transfers, and basically prohibit any former pro, international or domestic, from playing in college. Does it seem super likely to pass the Senate with 60 votes? No. Nothing ever passes the Senate with 60 votes. But it is one more storm cloud on the horizon.)

Wade does not appear to care about any of this. If you glance around rosters all across the men’s game, you’ll find very few staffs who have so aggressively cared less about the things the NCAA is trying to work through this offseason. The Luis thing is a clear eff-you, obviously, but the specifics of these international players’ careers aren’t spiritually far behind.

It’s not enough for Wade to be able to openly pay players. It’s not enough that college basketball has legitimized the methods he was once ostracized for. It’s not enough that he has reconquered the spare-no-expense, win-at-all-costs fiefdom from which he was once forcefully expelled. Redemption isn’t enough. He seems determined to keep pushing every boundary he can, forever, no matter how it affects everyone else — and at the exact moment the sport needs solidarity and collective responsibility from its most high-profile figures. And for a bunch of guys that may not even end up playing at LSU!

It’s confusing, but it’s also just sort of gross. Will Wade, shameless goofball, used to be a thing we enjoyed. Strong ass offers! Har har. It used to be good fun. Now it’s wearing thin.

Anyway, with NCAA Tournament expansion official, the weirdness in Baton Rouge — and the way the various new rules and guidance have hovered above it — was the defining story of an otherwise relatively quiet May. (When, as you may have noticed, Buzzer has been on an impromptu sabbatical, a bit of mental recovery after the breakneck first four months of the year. [Also: Arsenal.] Thanks for understanding.)

There were transfer moves here and there, and rosters that looked ominously hollow in April have slowly filled out, but May held nothing like the overwhelming flurry of activity when the portal first opened and we filed part one.

But with the NBA draft return decisions settled and a host of crucial stars returning to college basketball, now is the time to catch up on everything worth tracking — and circle back to some of the more interesting teams we didn’t have the bandwidth to analyze a few weeks ago.

So … yeah. Let’s do that. Below we cover the continued satisfaction of star players returning to college, whether Milan Momcilovic helps Kentucky’s roster make sense, how Koa Peat’s decision affects Arizona, the state of the Muss Bus, Gonzaga’s moment of transition, Jeremy Fears’ importance, Arizona State, the game theory of being the last good player in the portal, and more.

Milan Momcilovic’s timing left Kentucky no choice

Look: Milan Momcilovic was going to get paid a lot of money this summer no matter how he structured his free agency. Momcilovic was the best shooter in the sport a year ago; he made 48.6 percent of his 280 attempts from 3, which is certifiably insane. Someone was going to give him a lot of money. It was a guarantee.

Still, it’s safe to say Momcilovic wrung every last drop of value from the past two months of his life. Not only did his up-to-the-deadline flirtation with the NBA draft draw out the most desperate college teams, but Momcilovic narrowed his choices just so, sparking a bidding war between, of all programs, Kentucky and Louisville, the two most moneyed programs in the sport and mutually obsessed rivals.

According to a variety of reports, Momcilovic’s deal with UK is worth about $6.5 million. Even if that’s inflated in the reporting, it feels safe to say Momcilovic wouldn’t have hit anything close to what he got — which will likely make him the highest-paid player in the sport next season — had he decided in the first week or two after the portal opened. By June 1, Kentucky couldn’t afford to let Momcilovic go anywhere else, least of all Louisville. They had no choice but to pay up.

The real question is whether the player himself can remotely justify that kind of contract on the floor — and whether Mark Pope’s latest roster fits together any better than the one that turned into a mess last season.

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In 2010, I started writing Bubble Watch. I had no idea what I was getting myself into. My editor then assigned it to me, explained the concept, said he thought I would do a nice job with it. He also warned me: It was a lot. The first one, when so many teams were in pla…

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And just like that, the 2026 transfer portal is closed. Flew by, didn’t it? Fifteen days is not very many days. They nonetheless contained multitudes: a couple thousand players entered, hundreds of rosters were overhauled, and the trajectories of dozens programs were altered for better and worse. The sheer pace of activity was both thrilling and bewildering, albeit less so the latter than ever before.

There are, obviously, more developments to come. Lots of players who went in the portal are still not committed to schools. The No. 1 player in the class of 2026 is still weighing his options. The draft decision deadline is weeks away. A surprise NBA coaching change could reopen a great team’s roster. The potential for fifth-year players to receive a late-breaking NCAA waiver — predicated on a potential age-based eligibility policy change already being discussed in committee — could make the summer weird. Plenty of major programs have key rotation holes to fill.

But the first great wave of 2026 roster movement has given us more than enough to chew on now. Here’s a first, incomplete list of everything that has stuck out so far — with plenty more still to come.

Florida is the clear national title favorite — and another great sign for college basketball

On Tuesday’s podcast, which Tate and I recorded Monday evening, we were floating around some of our portal thoughts when I realized I wasn’t sure what was going on with Thomas Haugh and Florida overall (or if, as was guaranteed to happen, there was any news that we’d missed while recording). Until we mentioned it, I had taken it as read that Haugh would at least go test the draft, and that Florida’s roster would be in a bit of flux until then. Haugh hadn’t officially announced his decision to come back to Gainesville; that came 12 hours later. But Tate said the rumblings were already out there, and a realization dawned in real time on the show: Holy hell, Florida was going to be scary.

It was a startling realization. This idea hadn’t occurred before. The thought of Haugh turning down a clear first-round NBA path — after at least looking in to the possibility of a pro turn the previous summer — seemed farfetched. The idea of Florida returning that entire frontcourt again seemed crazy.

But here we are, and so forget everything we always say now about doing “way too early” projections in the portal era. I’ve seen enough: Florida is the obvious 2027 national title favorite.

Boogie Fland is back. Florida seems convinced prodigal son Denzel Aberdeen will get a waiver, but even if he doesn’t Urban Klavzar (who was often in Florida’s best lineups last season) can jump in. And then they’re running back the Haugh-Alex Condon-Ruben Chinyelu front three, which Golden has already proven — after some fall 2025 stylistic awkwardness — can work. With respect to Xaivian Lee, this Florida squad is arguably better than last season’s, and that team spent huge stretches of the SEC campaign dominating everyone in their path.

This is crazy. It’s also awesome for college basketball.

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A big part of the lament has always been that the portal and NIL makes teams impossible to hold together, that the incentives to start a new bidding war every spring are simply too strong — even for the best or most loyal players at top programs — to ignore. This is not at all what has happened with Florida (or with several other top teams this spring, which will be discussed throughout below). Indeed, it’s the opposite.

This is a clear upside of big money: Thomas Haugh, a potential but uncertain lottery pick, is arguably better off staying at UF for another season, where he will make yet more guaranteed life-changing cash without the downside risk of embarking on a professional career. Guys with far worse NBA chances than Haugh used to jump at the draft all the time. Suddenly, staying is the smart move.

Florida undoubtedly leveraged Haugh’s lifelong Gators fandom — his desire to be a legend like his own childhood heroes — in their pitch, too. But the point is that wasn’t their only pitch. The other part was money, now and beyond, and lots of it. That piece allowed Haugh to do what he really wanted to do all along anyway, without asking him to make massive and frankly stupid financial sacrifice. It allowed him to make a crucial life decision based on sentimentality. It made all else equal.

And so Florida will retain the core of one of the great teams of the past five years — the exact kind of classical, dominant, yeah-let’s-all-run-it-back-together groups the NIL era had supposedly killed off for good. This is the 2006-07 Florida Gators. This is Tyler Hansbrough, Ty Lawson, Wayne Ellington and Danny Green giving it one more go. This is an elite program convincing its best players to consider legacy and their time together. The only difference is that those decisions are made alongside money, rather than in opposition to it, and that money can be used for retention just as readily — and probably more efficiently — as an annual roster rebuild.

The more college basketball changes, the more it stays the same.

(Speaking of which: If Michigan, which has already retained Elliot Cadeau and Trey McKenney, gets similar draft decisions to Haugh’s from Morez Johnson and Aday Mara, then that whole sweeping take about Florida being the obvious favorite will get watered down a lot. This is Michigan we’re talking about. Johnson seems more likely than Mara to return, for what it’s worth, but we’ll see. There is also Duke. Duke is really good. There is also the Todd Golden question. But as it stands, Florida is No. 1.)

Kentucky keeps being a mess

If there was a defining characteristic to Kentucky’s disappointing 2025-26 season, beyond the misjudged and ill-fitting roster itself, it was the emotional intensity of it all. An early season loss to Louisville was bad enough on its own; Mark Pope’s strange wink-wink half-disclosure about a pregame locker room problem made it needlessly worse. Kentucky couldn’t just get rocked by a good Michigan State team at the Champions Classic; Pope had to make sure fans knew he viewed it is an existential crisis just as much as they did. Spending $22 million on a redundant roster that didn’t look like anything Pope had ever coached before was the original sin, sure. But the sense of chaos was especially damaging. The way the program, and specifically the head coach, handled early disappointments made fans feel like the grown ups maybe weren’t actually in charge after all. It was too messy.

It’s still super messy.

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Whether you immediately loathed the idea of men’s college basketball players transferring freely for money, or whether you were always enthusiastic about the concept — and there were dozens of us! — there was one thing pretty much every college basketball fan could always agree on:

It was, and remains, totally bewildering.

For decades, rosters were built in fundamentally the same way. Rare changes were always mild: gradually fewer destination restrictions, arcane graduate-transfer eligibility allowances, more players willing to just sit out a year anyway, a handful of bluebloods hoarding one-and-done lottery picks. The overall direction of travel was always the same. Coaches would spend years obsessing over thousands of high school prospects. They’d sign two or three or four of those prospects. (Occasionally, if not often, with the involvement of a paper bag.) Then they’d lay out their development programs, plan for multi-year scholarship timelines, and assume this ancient incentive structure — if you leave, you have to sit, tsk-tsk — would discourage defections.

Now all that is gone. In the past five years there have been, at last unofficial count, five gazillion words lamenting The Way Things Are Now. Yet despite all the wailing, we maybe still haven’t totally reckoned with just how epochal this revolution has been. Everything is different now. Everything keeps getting more different. Anyone who grew up watching a fundamentally different thing — even those who thought changes were necessary and good — has undergone a totally exhausting, brain-melting degree of cultural change. It’s been insane.

Which is maybe why I have, the past couple springs, found myself mostly uninterested in the day-to-day mechanics of the portal. I guess I was overwhelmed.

With thousands of players moving in all directions — and with so many of them entering during the NCAA Tournament, when all I want to do is think about the freaking NCAA Tournament, thanks — there were too many 300-word newsers, too many overhyped posts about 17.3 points-per-game-averaging MAAC guards, too much “has narrowed his final list to,” too unwieldy a volume of campus visits, too inexhaustible a glut of “with that being said.” It was like trying to catch dust.

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I love this game. I think the product on the floor is better and more entertaining than ever. I think the portal is both a moral and competitive good. But the process itself has never been actively enjoyable. It was a firehose of information overload, and every individual piece of information was half-formed, isolated, context-free. In the moment, what sense could you make of any of it? It’s not like you could start analyzing teams. You could barely analyze team needs. You had no idea how much money programs had to spend, or which coaches were actually offering which players what, or how many shoes were left to drop or when. Better, then, to check out, circle back in mid-summer, let the dust settle.

All of which I’d been thinking about last week, as I left Indianapolis and joined my family on spring break, and in the days since. At some point along the way, as I found myself unwittingly eager to follow each bit of transfer news, and then happily dig in to the player afterward, it dawned on me:

This doesn’t feel so weird now. I feel like I know what’s going on. Also: I’m enjoying this? I’m enjoying this. This is getting fun.

Why? Why now? There are a few things going on here (above and beyond all of the positives I’ve been going on about since 2021).

1. It opened after the tournament ended

Just an obvious, perfect change. Clear delineation. Needs no further explanation. It’s so much better.

2. The information environment is now keeping up

This is the biggest improvement by far. In the early days, there were very few centralized places to find comprehensive transfer portal information. You absorbed it mostly ephemerally. VerbalCommits was the only big fat list of every player in the portal, with their previous team and the destination (if applicable) and it was — respectfully, pre-redesign — not exactly the pinnacle of data readability. (You just had to Ctrl-F your way around. It wasn’t the end of the world.) Editorially driven rankings, with blurbs and the whole nine, were usually simple and counting stats-obsessed.

Look at us now. Beyond the reporters doing the usual (great) newsbreaking work, Trilly chief among them, there are incredible options for deeper context and analysis. Bart Torvik maintains not one but two massive databases of transfer players — one for players who have committed and one for guys still in the portal — ranked according to his own advanced stats. You can subscribe to Jim Root’s regularly updated Google Sheet as he tracks and fills out every roster in the country. You can read extremely detailed tactics- and fit-oriented deep dives on every significant transfer, as they happen, from our buddies at Basket Under Review. The Athletic guys are doing high-level player rankings, tinged with Sam Vecenie’s scouting perspective. There’s a ton more besides.

And then there’s Evan Miyakawa. Evan’s own portal rankings — based on his BPR metric, which includes a defensive performance component most models don’t account for — are about as useful as you’ll find. But Evan’s work behind the scenes really fascinates me. Last summer, Evan launched the Front Office Suite, a tool programs can use to input NIL values they’re hearing in the market, even ephemerally. The estimates go in, they bump into Evan’s metrics, and coaches can get a sense of not only what players are good but where value can be had.

As Evan laid out Tuesday, this data is already allowing him to form meaningful about the 2026 portal, namely that — as expected — big guys are getting wildly overpaid:

By looking at players across positions who are expected to have similar value next year according to our player projections, we can compare their actual going rates to determine market demand. … Centers are being the most overpaid, costing about 30% more than they should on average, while point guards are more of a bargain. … [To] obtain a center or a point guard who are equivalent in talent level, it would cost $1.3 million for the center, while only $813,000 for the point guard. That means, in this market, it costs 61% more NIL dollars to get a center of the same caliber as a point guard.

Evan’s data also showed that the total pool of money in the market is still growing rapidly:

There are about 30 teams that use the Front Office Suite, spanning 12 conferences in the high-major and mid-major ranks. By summarizing the NIL player data entered across all teams and comparing it to last year’s market data, we can gain a pretty good understanding of how the NIL market has changed over the past year.

As mentioned at the top, the NIL market for Division 1 players is up about 65% from last year. That means that a player good enough to be valued at $1 million last offseason would be getting around $1.65 million this offseason. It’s pretty hard to fathom how market rates have increased this much, especially since we saw a similar increase from 2024 to 2025, if not even higher.

The market is up even higher for players coming from high-major programs: There has been a 73% increase in the going rate for players on power conference teams. The market increase for players from low- and mid-major conferences is slightly lower, up 44% from last offseason.

Reminder: We’re one week in to the 2026 portal. This is incredibly useful information! (Evan is a very smart dude.) It is bound to inform a ton of the analysis that happens in the next weeks and months, and may already be impacting the way coaches are considering roster builds. (Maybe go back four-out? Mid-2010s smallball?!)

But the most exciting thing about Evan’s info is that it feels like the first fleeting glimpse of a new world altogether. Maybe eventually we'll actually know what guys are getting paid and what teams have to spend. So much of the confusion and messiness of this time of year — the complete opacity of offers, counteroffers, agent talk and budgets — could one day become fully transparent. The possibilities for value-based analysis beyond player role and team fit would explode.

That journey has just begun. But we’re already light years from where we started.

3. Programs (and players) keep getting smarter

To wit: P.J. Haggerty.

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Dan Hurley made no secret of his distaste for the way UConn was discussed before its national semifinal win over Illinois Saturday — intentionally interjecting the take after an unrelated question, just to make sure he got it out there.

“You’re coming into the game as an underdog versus a team that you beat by 13 points earlier in the season, which was kind of surprising, that that’s how we kind of came into the game,” Hurley said after the Huskies’ 71-62 win. “Obviously I’ve been waiting to say that and now I forgot your question.”

It was, in retrospect, a bit silly to think of UConn as the plucky outsider. This is a program with two titles and three Final Four (and now national title game) appearances in the past four seasons. This is a coach with an unthinkably brilliant record in the last two weekends of the NCAA Tournament. This is a sustained, historic run of success much else in modern college hoops history. Doubting UConn is dumb.

Which is why it was so funny to hear Hurley talk about Monday’s game against Michigan, in which he thanked the basketball gods his Huskies only need to beat these guys once:

“Really, you don’t have to be the best team,” Hurley said Sunday. “You don’t have to have the best season to win this tournament. These are all one game, Game 7, single elimination. There’s been plenty of times in the history of this tournament where the best team hasn’t won it. You’ve just got to be better for one night. … The good thing for us, it’s not a seven-game series. Just got to play one game on Monday night.”

What a difference 12 hours, and two Big Ten opponents, makes. Sunday’s presser at Lucas Oil Stadium was notably low on the kind of swaggering cash talk you occasionally get from “the best coach in the f***ing sport.” There was no winking, actually-I-think-we’re-better stuff. Later, Hurley told The Field of 68’s Jeff Goodman he was “checking to see if there’s a judge who will let my ‘24 team come back to Indy and help out.” He didn’t even push back on Jeff’s David vs. Goliath joke! This is freaking UConn we’re talking about. The undisputed reigning king of the sport, leading a blueblood with an unmatched history of modern postseason success, sounded like a mid-major guy stoking blind faith, in contrast to all available evidence, that his team really could shock the world.

This is what Michigan has done to this Final Four.

Frankly, we should have known. It was right there all along. Even if you thought Arizona’s interior-obsessed offense would struggle against its worst possible matchup in Michigan (and we did) it felt crazy to expect the extent of the whooping Dusty May’s team delivered. And yet Saturday night, and basically the entire UM run, has felt like a reminder of a truth we all first discovered in November:

Sometimes, first impressions are right. The best team is just the best team. Conference play, with all of its rigor and all of its quality opposition, can almost become distracting. Tommy Lloyd had an interesting thought about this after Arizona’s blowout loss Saturday: Even if you’re really, really good (and Arizona was), Michigan is the kind of historically dominant squad that takes time to get used to, and if you don’t have that they can kill you before the game even really starts:

“I think they’re one of those teams -- I would say, like, Houston’s like that, or even Iowa State’s like that, teams we played, you have to play them a few times,” Lloyd said. “After you kind of get used to playing them a few times you get more comfortable. I think that’s probably why you saw more closer games in the Big Ten for them towards the end — because teams probably got comfortable playing them and had a better plan.”

This seems right. Coaches’ deep understanding of their own closed competitive ecosystems — how players on X team match up with your own, and thus opponent Y, etc. — undoubtedly help too, even if you haven’t played Michigan twice. Purdue’s Big Ten title win was the most notable example: A Matt Painter tactical masterclass built on the Boilermakers’ own unique strengths (using Braden Smith’s dribble sense and Trey Kaufman-Renn’s 15-foot push shots to pull Michigan’s bigs out from under the rim), deployed against a team it had faced just three weeks’ prior.

This is not a luxury most tourney teams have. At every stop, Michigan’s opponents have looked exactly the same as the teams Michigan hammered once it figured things out in late November: overwhelmed, shellshocked, finished in a flash.

The formula remains the same. It is uniquely designed for postseason surety.

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INDIANAPOLIS — The Final Four is always great, obviously, because it’s the Final Four. It can’t not be fun. But all Final Fours are not created equal.

We can’t help but think about 2011, about how far we’ve come. Remember 2011? A post-Gordon Hayward Butler and that First Four VCU — two teams that won a combined nine NCAA Tournament games and still finished 36th and 53rd in adjusted efficiency in KenPom’s final rankings — played in one national semifinal. Kemba Walker-era UConn, which ended the regular season 21-9 and 4-7 in their last 11, beat a grinding Kentucky 56-55 on the other side. Then came the title game: 53-41 UConn. Fifty-seven possessions. Dross.

Back then, being a year-round college basketball fan took work. The default posture was defensive. The criticisms of the product were loud and obvious and frankly correct — the game was too physical, too defensive, too short on talent, and simply not that much fun to sit down and watch — and we true believers, surrounded on all sides by people puncturing our little bubble, could look silly trying to defend it. But there was no defending that title game.

Most of all, there was no defending the college basketball season that preceded it. There was no defending the prevailing culture in the sport, the years of decline and decay, that produced it. However defensive one was inclined to be — the tournament is always great, the sport will be fine just like it always is, and anyway this is our thing, leave us alone, don’t watch if you don’t like it, hmph — there was no denying that debacle at NRG. At minimum, it forced a top-down strategic reckoning. Eighteen months later, the freedom of movement era began.

That was 15 years ago. Look at us now.

This Final Four feels like the end result of everything that has changed for the better about the sport since. With respect to Kemba, the four squads in Indy this week would have blown any of those 2011 teams out of the damn gym. They would also have been incomprehensible, practically alien — simultaneously huge and fast and hyperefficient and smart. The complexity and stylistic diversity of these four teams’ tactics would have given most 2011 coaches a seizure. Wait: Your playmaking guards are Keaton Wagler and David Mirkovic? You have Yaxel Lendeborg, Aday Mara, and Morez Johnson, and you prefer to get out and run? You bring Tobe Awaka off the bench?! You run these sets, like, every possession? What the hell is all this?!

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Among casual fans, the tournament is most renowned for its wackiness. Survivorship bias distorts conclusions. Some Final Fours are just, you know, the four teams that won. But more often than not, the final weekend of the season says something meaningful about the sport that yielded it.

This is a fantastic, fascinating edition, populated by historically excellent teams who are also super fun to watch. It’s no accident. This is what college basketball is now.

In case you can’t tell, we can’t wait for Saturday night. Can’t wait to watch it play out. Can’t wait to bask in it at all at Lucas Oil Stadium. Can’t wait to have that moment where we snap out of it and realize it’s time to decide what we’re going to say and write. Just can’t stop thinking about it. So, as is tradition, here are a few of the things we’ve been thinking about:

No. 3 Illinois vs. No. 2 UConn (Saturday, 6:09 pm ET)

1. Can Illinois stop Tarris Reed?

On the podcast two weeks ago, we half-joked with Tate about Tarris Reed’s historic first NCAA Tournament weekend, when Reed became the first player since Tim Duncan in 1997 to have at least 40 points and 40 rebounds in the first two rounds. The joke, of course, was that Reed had 31 points and 27 rebounds in the first round against Furman (which, to be clear, is still insane), and then had a very pedestrian performance in the second. The Duncan comparison sounded better than it felt.

Nobody’s joking about it now. Reed is having one of the historically great tournaments of any big in living memory. He had 20-5-4 against the bulwark frontcourt of Michigan State. He had 26 points, nine rebounds, four blocks, three assists and two steals against Duke and, as the rest of the Huskies flailed from the perimeter, was the only reason the Blue Devils weren’t up by a totally unrecoverable margin at halftime.

He will have to be every bit as good Saturday night.

Tactically speaking, Illinois is not a team that wants to double the post, particularly if the other team (like, say, Indiana, which Illinois throttled with this strategy Feb. 15) is doing a lot of complex off-ball screening and movement. The Illini have plenty of size and rim protection down there, after all, and they’d rather let their perimeter defenders stay extended. Maybe Brad Underwood will cook up different looks for this game — his subtle gravitational adjustments against Houston doomed the Cougars — but everything we’ve seen from this Illini team suggests it will prioritize the outside-in threat rather than the other way around.

This makes Reed the most important player in the game. The rest of the analytical breakdown favors the Illini: This is the best offense in the country, led by a freshman lottery pick that basically none of UConn’s guards or wings can individually match up with, playing for a coaching staff that has long since decided letting Wagler but also Mirkovic and Andrej Stojakovic hunt matchups is the most straightforward path to success. Illinois used to be a more systematic offensive team; it was at its best in a collective flow state. That was the kind of team you could see Ben McCollum drawing in to his Iowa quicksand. That’s not this Illinois. This one can play a bunch of different ways — it plays notably faster with Stojakovic flying at the rim than when Mirkovic is playing booty-ball from 18 feet — but the end result is almost always a good shot. Good luck with this:

UConn is more unlikely than any of Illinois’ three Final Four opponents to have the answers for those one-on-one matchups. Illinois is going to score, and it is going to run like hell, and use all of its positional length, trying to keep the Huskies from generating good looks off of all those pretty offensive sets.

Reed is the answer. Reed’s ability to generate a steady churn of points against the tall but not exactly physically stout Ivisicii — to establish a baseline, to hang around, to put the opponents in foul trouble, to start gnawing away at the load-bearing pillars, to put Underwood’s beautiful machine under stress — is the single biggest prospective advantage UConn has.

2. Does Danny Hurley have one more in him?

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Straight in to part two. See here for part one:

East Region

No. 5 St. Johns vs. No. 1 Duke (Friday, 7:10 pm ET)
No. 3 Michigan State vs. No. 2 UConn (Friday, 9:45 pm ET)

9. Can St. John’s offense be more than transition and Zuby?

On the one hand, yes: Bryce Hopkins just made six 3s against Kansas. Asked and answered! On the other hand: come on. Hopkins had made 25 3s all season before last Sunday. This is not something anyone should expect to happen again.

This remains the big question for the Johnnies, and the reason why (despite thought No. 10 just below this) we expect Duke to win the game. St. John’s is one of the best transition teams in college basketball. Or, at the very least, one of the most transition-dependent teams in college basketball. When they are running — playing off their aggressive defense, flying at you with all that length and interior finishing skill — they can be super-efficient. But as we saw against Kansas, Hopkins or not, when they have to run half-court stuff, they can get totally bogged down.

The bad news: Duke is really good at playing transition defense.

Whatever modern hybrid space-y stuff Jon Scheyer has adopted (and adapted) on offense, this Blue Devils team practically plays a Bo Ryan style when it comes to sprinting back on defense. (It used to be teams like Ryan’s and Tony Bennett’s would intentionally eschew offensive rebounds to get back into their half-court defensive shell, but Duke is incredible at doing both. No. 1 overall seed for a reason.) Duke ranks 343rd in the country in defensive possession length, per KenPom. They really don’t let you get up and down. And so when they don’t — and presumably, unless something goes totally haywire against St. John’s, they won’t — the Johnnies are going to have to figure out how to get into some sort of offense in the half court.

Zuby Ejiofor will be fine. He might even knock down a couple of 3s of his own, as the Blue Devils attempt to force him away from the rim. But Dillon Mitchell and Hopkins and Ian Jackson and Oziyah Sellers — all of these guys have to find more flow than what they conjured up against a Kansas team with less athleticism, length, and switchability than Duke. They have to figure out a way to be a surprise.

10. Is this Cam Boozer’s nightmare matchup?

Whatever ugliness you can see in your mind’s eye for the St. John’s offense, it’s not like these guys can’t guard on the other end. They’re pretty great at that. And indeed: They might be the ideal team to play against the most productive player in all of college basketball. They fit him perfectly.

Boozer is often a brute interior battering ram, and does most of his best work over his left shoulder, but most of all he’s a matchup problem. He can handle the ball and make elite reads. He can draw switches and punish them. He can step out and hit 3s. Guarding him well requires a very specific type of player — not a center, not a 3, not even a typical power forward, but a guy with similar size and mobility who is comfortable playing in all of the same zones. Like, say, Virginia’s Thijs De Ridder, who played a big part in Boozer’s worst game of the 2025-26 season (a high bar, but still) in the ACC tournament title game. De Ridder is a 6-foot-9 forward-wing with strength and foot speed; he looked like a plausible, visible counter to Boozer even back on Feb. 28, when the Cavaliers got blown out in Cameron.

St. John’s has like three of these guys.

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