With the growing importance of metrics, the NET rankings continue to be a huge talking point among the NCAA Selection Committee. After one month of the season, the first NET rankings of the 2025-26 season were released on Monday.
Michigan topped the list after its dominating performance in the Players Era Festival. Duke sits one spot behind them, with Purdue, Vanderbilt, and Gonzaga rounding out the top five. Arizona sits at six despite an incredible early resume. Indiana and Iowa find themselves at 11 and 16, respectively, after their roster overhaul under new coaching staffs. Defending champions Florida fell to 33, eight spots behind Ivy League Yale.
With so much changing between each season, what are some important trends that appear in the first version of the rankings? Will they change drastically? Or will they remain similar to their first release? Let’s dive in.
2025-26 NET Rankings Release: Trends and Surprises
Power Conference Parity Once More
Last season, the SEC dominated from the beginning. Upon release of the rankings in 2024, the SEC had an average ranking of 38.75. The Big 12 and Big Ten followed closely behind at 53.31 and 55.11, respectively. However, the Big East and ACC drastically trailed their counterparts, averaging a ranking of 84.00 and 95.89, respectively. While averages fail to tell the whole story in all situations, the differences in just one year say a lot.
The SEC leads the way with an average ranking of 54.19, while the Big 12, Big Ten, and ACC sit at 60.19, 69.33, and 71.67, respectively. The Big East lags further behind with an average ranking of 89.64. The gap between the conferences fell from 57.14 to 35.45. The conferences are much closer together in quality than they had been. The gap between the ACC and SEC is nearly the same as the SEC had over the second-best conference. The SEC may currently be the best conference, but with another month of non-conference play, there is plenty of time for reshuffling before conferences begin to play each other.
Power Conferences Have Low Floors
After conference play begins, most of the teams at the bottom of power conferences begin to raise their NET Ranking because of an increasingly difficult schedule. For that reason, we will once again compare the current ranking with the first ranking from a season ago. The SEC and Big 12 each had one team outside of the top 120. The Big Ten and Big East had two, and the ACC had six. This year, the ACC dropped to three, the Big East and Big Ten doubled their total to four, the Big 12 jumped to two, and the SEC remained at one.
While last year, one conference clearly carried the depth of bad teams, this season provides a different trend. In the first 2025-26 NET Rankings, four of the five conferences have multiple teams that find themselves in the middle-third of college basketball rankings. While each of the conferences has at least one team ranked inside the top 10, the floor is lower for several conferences. Now, with so much parity, this number could fall as the season wears on, but there is the potential for some poor performances in the power conferences once again.
Mid-Major Resurgence
Will the mid-majors please stand up? While their strength of schedule in conference play will likely hurt them in the long run, several mid-major conference teams find themselves in a good position moving forward, including several unlikely candidates.
Gonzaga continues to lead the way, but Utah State sits at 22, Yale at 25, Tulsa at 27, St. Mary’s at 29, Santa Clara at 32, and Belmont at 35. There are some major surprises in that group of teams. Are there traditional one big conferences that have teams inside the top 35? UC San Diego sits at 41, Akron at 42, George Mason at 43, McNeese State at 44, George Washington at 47, Saint Louis at 49, and VCU at 57. Wyoming, Colombia, California Baptist, and High Point at 59-62, just ahead of Ohio State.
Power conferences dominate the top 20, but the rest of the top 100 is full of mid-major teams. In all, 39 mid-major squads find themselves inside the top 100. Most people would agree that this kind of representation and performance among mid-major schools is better for college basketball. Could we get more multi-bid conferences than ever before? Could surprising conferences bring multiple teams into an at-large discussion? Last season, there were 9 mid-major teams in the top 50 compared to 13 this season.
The 2025-26 NET rankings could be the first signs of a crazy season of college basketball.
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