The most interesting and confusing rosters of the 2025 offseason

A deep dive on new teams that catch the eye (and tons more besides)

Photo credit: USA Today

A few weeks ago, the mailbag led with a pressing question: What, exactly, was Indiana doing with its roster? New coach Darian DeVries was, in theory, prioritizing certain qualities, like perimeter shooting, positional flexibility, and collective roster fit. But he was doing so by acquiring a group of intriguing but hardly proven mid-major up-transfers — the kinds of Moneyball-y guys one might assume IU, with its rumored $10 million-ish NIL budget, wouldn’t have to outwit the market to find.

There was one major caveat to any analysis, though: The portal wasn’t closed yet. Good players were still mulling the NBA draft. Late additions were possible. It was hard to make any truly definitive statements about Indiana’s roster — or any roster — because life in the portal era means you just don’t know.

We have a slightly better idea now. The NBA draft withdrawal deadline has passed. Save a few stragglers, rosters are mostly set. Offseason “winners and losers” columns have been published; Top 25 lists have been refreshed.

At the same time, it is only early June. Coaches are barely getting their teams together for summer workouts and pickup runs. If you ask them for their views on their rosters, they might give you some of the rationale for what they like about their guys, or why they brought certain specific transfers in, but mostly they’ll just shrug. Who knows how good we’ll be?

It’s too early to begin previewing the 2025-26 season, then, but it’s not too early to vibe-check the results of the 2025 offseason’s mass personnel migration. Below, we dig in on 18 teams that stick out to us in one of two distinct ways — either because the given roster is particularly intriguing, or because it’s downright confusing. Just because a team is good (you won’t see Houston or Purdue below, for example) doesn’t mean it’s listed; ditto for teams that are just kind of bad.

These are the most interesting teams of the 2025 summer — with “interesting” meant alternatively as a compliment or a dig — alongside many other tangential thoughts (international recruiting, NIL salary guesses, portal fatigue, why “NIL money” is your money, stylistic versatility, whether losing to Arkansas will haunt Rick Pitino forever, a recruit named Chandler Bing, and much, much more).

North Carolina (derogatory)

On Monday, citing multiple sources, Inside Carolina’s Greg Barnes reported that North Carolina had “surpassed the $14 million mark in its financial commitment to the 2025-26 roster, approximately triple what was spent” last season. That roster was assembled with help from newly hired men’s basketball executive director and general manager Jim Tanner’s, whose $850,000 salary “represents another bullet point confirming the university’s support of its prized program,” Barnes wrote.

That … is a staggering number. In the spring, Matt Norlander reported that coaches and administrators generally saw the highest tier of NIL budgets as hovering around the $10 million threshold, give or take; at no point did anyone suggest anyone else was going to spend $14 million. Carolina, where elite status is non-negotiable, did.

So it would be a staggering number regardless of how the roster looked, of whether it appeared to be an undeniable powerhouse entering the 2025-26 season. But it is especially eye-popping given what UNC’s actual roster looks like.

Caleb Wilson is a big time freshman, no doubt. But he’s not, or at least most people don’t regard him as, a Cooper Flagg-level — or even A.J. Dybantsa-level — talent. He might be really good. He might have growing pains. We’ll see. However you rate the player, though, he is not a can’t-miss-oh-that’s-where-the-money-went type of guy.

Hubert Davis was active in the transfer portal, bringing in five players, almost all of them established contributors at high-major schools. Arizona transfer center Henri Veesaar and Alabama stretch big Jarin Stevenson should both alleviate UNC’s broad frontcourt woes and give Davis more offensive flexibility, too. Jonathan Powell is a good get from West Virginia. Kyan Evans was an elite scoring guard (including 44.6 percent from 3 on 157 attempts) at Colorado State. Derek Dixon and Isaiah Denis appear to be solid enough freshman guards. Luka Bogavac averaged 14.9 points in the Adriatic League last season, and looks like yet another example of quality foreign players coming to the US college system to get some of that sweet NIL cash.

It’s a decent roster! It’s likely a pretty good team! If you’re starting Evans, Seth Trimble, Bogavac, Wilson and Veesaar, you’re likely to be close to the top of the ACC. But it is not a roster that screams “Wow, UNC really dominated the transfer portal, these guys are the obvious employers of choice” — even on an $8 or $10 million budget. Hearing that UNC spent $14 million makes you wonder where the Darrion Williamses, J.T. Toppins, Boogie Flands and Ja’Kobi Gillespies are.

The answer: other schools. Before this week, it was easy to assume UNC hadn’t fully maximized its NIL project, that it was still a creaking old blueblood, that SEC schools with fewer pretensions were better suited to the brave new world. The Tar Heels only just acquiesced to hiring a GM this spring, after all.

But $14 million?! And for this?

This is another fun wrinkle to the NIL era, by the way: Trying to understand how teams are spending their money. Eventually, maybe, college basketball salaries will be public, and the sport will enter a period of fandom that includes nerdy cap analysis and transparent free agency budgeting. Maybe there will even be a second apron! (Whatever that is.) In the meantime, when all you have a reported top-line number and a list of players to look at, you have to guess at where all the money went. In North Carolina’s case — as with a few other teams on this list — it’s hard to understand.

Marquette (mildly derogatory)

We have long lauded Shaka Smart’s decision to swerve in the face of portal madness — to double down on retention and loyalty to a core group of players. Smart realized you don’t have to shuffle kids in and out the door every year to compete for conference titles and high tournament seeds, and that a settled environment, focused development and deep relationships can be powerful recruiting pitches, too. The old ways are still an option; Marquette has been the top practitioner.

Then again: When you have Tyler Kolek, Kam Jones and Oso Iguodaro in your starting five, fostering a culture of bidirectional loyalty is also smart. You want those guys to stick around! You don’t want Kansas to poach Kolek for an NIL bag you can’t counter. Eventually, though, those players graduate, or get drafted, and then comes the real test. If you’re really committed to your culture — to not bringing in transfers over the top of players you’ve signed — you have to engage with the side of the old ways many fans no longer have the patience for: rebuilding.