Through Oct. 31, Sports Illustrated will count down its preseason college basketball Top 25 with overviews of each team. Here are the full rankings so far.
If you believe the analytics, Gonzaga was a top-10 team last season that ran into miserable luck. The Bulldogs dropped a number of close games early, which left them stuck as a No. 8 seed in the NCAA tournament and matched them up with an elite Houston squad in the second round. From an eye-test standpoint, the truth feels a bit more murky: The Bulldogs still had the juice to beat the brakes off good teams on their best nights, but on their worst showed cracks in the armor (especially defensively) that we haven’t seen in quite a while in Spokane.
