Culture

Kansas, Alabama, UConn top AP Top 25 preseason men’s basketball poll: Key takeaways

Published

7 months ago

October 15, 2024

Kansas, Alabama, UConn top AP Top 25 preseason men’s basketball poll: Key takeaways

By Brendan Marks, Justin Williams and Mark Cooper

For the second consecutive season, Kansas will begin the year as the No. 1 team in men’s college basketball. This time, the Jayhawks hope to stay there.

Kansas received 30 of 60 first-place votes to top the preseason AP Top 25 on Monday, putting it narrowly ahead of No. 2 Alabama (14 first-place votes) and two-time defending champion Connecticut, which was ranked third. The Huskies received 11 first-place votes.

Houston (four first-place votes) and Iowa State rounded out the top five. Gonzaga, which received one first-place vote, was sixth, followed by Duke, Baylor, North Carolina and Arizona.

Kansas, which went 23-11 and lost in the second round of the NCAA Tournament last season, returns three starters — Hunter Dickinson, KJ Adams Jr. and Dajuan Harris Jr. — and added a litany of transfers, including former Wisconsin guard AJ Storr, former Alabama guard Rylan Griffen and former South Dakota State guard Zeke Mayo, the Summit League player of the year. It’s the 13th consecutive year Bill Self’s program has begun the season ranked in the top 10, and the fifth time in KU history that it will open the season No. 1. The Jayhawks trail only North Carolina (10), Duke (nine) and UCLA (eight) for the most since preseason rankings began in 1962.

Five Big 12 teams ranked in the top 10. The SEC led all conferences with nine teams in the Top 25.

Preseason AP men’s Top 25

RANK	TEAM	CONFERENCE
1		Big 12
2 Advertisement		SEC
3		Big East
4		Big 12 Advertisement
5		Big 12
6		West Coast
7 Advertisement		ACC
8		Big 12
9		ACC Advertisement
10		Big 12
11		SEC
12 Advertisement		SEC
13		SEC
14		Big Ten Advertisement
15		Big East
16		SEC
17 Advertisement		Big Ten
18		Big East
19		SEC Advertisement
20		Big 12
21		SEC
22 Advertisement		Big Ten
23		SEC
24		SEC Advertisement
25		Big Ten

Others receiving votes: Illinois 92, St. John’s 91, Xavier 73, Texas Tech 58, Wake Forest 37, Kansas St 30, Michigan State 29, Ohio State 29, Michigan 19, BYU 14, Oregon 12, McNeese State 11, Miami 11, Boise St. 9, Saint Louis 9, Clemson 9, Providence 9, Mississippi State 6, VCU 6, Wisconsin 5, Saint Mary’s 5, Louisville 4, UAB 4, Arkansas Little Rock 3, Grand Canyon 3, Arizona State 2, San Diego State 2, Princeton 2, High Point 1, Maryland 1.

Why Kansas is No. 1

A number of teams have reasonable arguments to be No. 1. Alabama — fresh off its first Final Four appearance in program history — returns All-American guard Mark Sears and added the nation’s second-ranked high school recruiting class. Houston has won 30 games or more three years running, and while point guard Jamal Shead is off to the NBA, the return of forwards Joseph Tugler and Terrance Arceneaux should once again make the Cougars one of America’s deepest teams. Then there’s Gonzaga, which returns four of five starters from last season’s Sweet 16 squad, while also adding multiple new contributors via the transfer portal.

But ultimately, it’s hard to overlook Kansas’ collection of talent, which is why the Jayhawks are a deserving preseason No. 1. Self not only returns a trio of tested starters in Adams, Harris and Dickinson, but went heavy in the transfer portal this spring, too, landing one of the nation’s top transfer classes. Griffen, the former Alabama wing, shot 39.2 percent from 3-point range last season and will be a welcome 3-and-D addition on the perimeter, especially beside relative non-shooters in Adams and Harris. He was No. 7 in The Athletic’s transfer portal rankings. Storr — who led Wisconsin in scoring last season — arrives as another key perimeter piece, and should allow Self a level of lineup versatility he hasn’t had the last two seasons. Then there’s Mayo, whose pull-up shooting will be a boon for a team that sometimes struggled to get a basket last year.

Add in a pair of top-50 freshmen, and Self has another lineup seemingly built to go the distance. — Brendan Marks, staff writer

UConn’s bid for a 3-peat begins at No. 3

UConn will open the season ranked third. Last year, the Huskies were sixth in the preseason. (Jamie Squire / Getty Images)

Dan Hurley and Connecticut will attempt to do something that no men’s college basketball program has done since John Wooden’s UCLA dynasty: win three consecutive national titles.

The Huskies returned several key pieces last season from Hurley’s first title team in 2022-23, but that’s not the case this year. Four of five starters are gone, and the lone holdover — redshirt junior wing Alex Karaban, who passed on potentially becoming a first-round NBA Draft choice to return to college — will have to assume a much larger role. Still: Hurley’s team has more than earned the benefit of the doubt, which is why UConn opens the year in the top three.

Besides Karaban, UConn has three other rotational players back this season — guards Hassan Diarra and Solomon Ball, plus center Samson Johnson — who will compete for major playing time. But if the Huskies are reasonably going to compete for a third straight title, Hurley will need outsized contributions from Saint Mary’s transfer Aidan Mahaney and five-star freshman Liam McNeeley, arguably his top two additions this offseason. We’ll know a lot about UConn, and its relative chances of three-peating, by the time conference play begins; the Huskies are part of a stacked Maui Invitational field featuring four of the nation’s top 11 teams and then play Texas, Baylor, and Gonzaga all in a row in mid-December. — Marks

Big 12 dominates the top 10

There’s a lot of Big 12 flavor at the top of the poll. The conference has three of the top five and half of the top 10 with Kansas, Houston, Iowa State, Baylor and Arizona. The sixth and final Big 12 team in the Top 25 is Cincinnati at No. 20. It’s the Bearcats’ first appearance in the AP poll since the end of the 2018-19 season, Mick Cronin’s last as head coach of the program.

The new-look, 16-team league features nine programs that made the NCAA Tournament last season, seven of which are returning members, and has been the top-rated conference four of the past six years, according to KenPom metrics. Kansas is the Big 12’s most recent national champion from the 2021-22 season. — Justin Williams, staff writer

A stacked SEC

Nine of the 16 SEC members appear in the preseason poll, led by Alabama at No. 2. The Crimson Tide are the only SEC school in the top 10, followed by Auburn at No. 11. League newcomer Texas clocks in at No. 19. Arkansas, under new head coach John Calipari, opens at No. 16, while his former school Kentucky and head coach Mark Pope are No. 23. — Williams

No love for mid-majors

There are zero mid-major or traditional non-power programs in the Top 25, with Gonzaga the only ranked team from outside the sport’s five major conferences. The closest is McNeese State, which received 11 votes, followed by Boise State and Saint Louis with nine votes each. McNeese is coming off a 30-4 season under head coach Will Wade in which it set the program’s single-season wins record and claimed the Southland Conference regular season and tournament championships. The Cowboys have never appeared in the Top 25 rankings. — Williams

CJ Moore’s ballot

The Athletic’s CJ Moore is a voter in the AP Top 25 this season.

Here’s how his ballot compared:

Alabama (actual: No. 2)
Gonzaga (actual: No. 6)
Houston (actual: No. 4)
Kansas (actual: No. 1)
Iowa State (actual: No. 5)
Duke (actual: No. 7)
UConn (actual: No. 3)
Tennessee (actual: No. 12)
Baylor (actual: No. 8)
Arizona (actual: No. 10)
Auburn (actual: No. 11)
Texas A&M (actual: No. 12)
North Carolina (actual: No. 9)
Purdue (actual: No. 14)
Marquette (actual: No. 18)
Florida (actual: No. 21)
Texas Tech (actual: NR)
Michigan (actual: NR)
Indiana (actual: No. 17)
Illinois (actual: NR)
Cincinnati (actual: No. 20)
Xavier (actual: NR)
Kentucky (actual: No. 23)
St. John’s (actual: NR)
UCLA (actual: 22)

(Photo: Chris Gardner / Getty Images)

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Book Review: ‘Hunger Like a Thirst,’ by Besha Rodell

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Book Review: ‘Hunger Like a Thirst,’ by Besha Rodell

HUNGER LIKE A THIRST: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, a Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table, by Besha Rodell

Consider the food critic’s memoir. An author inevitably faces the threat of proportional imbalance: a glut of one (the tantalizing range of delicacies eaten) and want of the other (the nonprofessional life lived). And in this age of publicly documenting one’s every bite, it’s easier than ever to forget that to simply have dined, no matter how extravagantly, is not enough to make one interesting, or a story worth telling.

Fortunately, the life of Beshaleba River Puffin Rodell has been as unusual as her name. In fact, as she relays in the author’s note that opens “Hunger Like a Thirst,” a high school boyfriend believed she’d “made up her entire life story,” starting with her elaborate moniker.

Born in Australia on a farm called Narnia, she is the daughter of hippies. Her father, “a man of many lives and vocations,” was in his religious scholar phase, whence Beshaleba, an amalgamation of two Bible names, cometh.

Rodell’s mother returned to her native United States, with her children and new husband, when Besha was 14. Within the first 20-plus years of her life, she had bounced back and forth repeatedly between the two continents and, within the U.S., between multiple states. “‘I’m not from here’ is at the core of who I am,” she writes.

It’s also at the core of her work as a restaurant critic, and what, she convincingly argues, distinguishes her writing from that of many contemporaries. She has the distanced perspective of a foreigner, but also lacks the privilege of her counterparts, who are often male and frequently moneyed. “For better or for worse, this is the life that I have,” she writes. “The one in which a lady who can’t pay her utility bills can nonetheless go eat a big steak and drink martinis.” This, she believes, is her advantage: “Dining out was never something I took for granted.”

It started back in Narnia on the ninth birthday of her childhood best friend, who invited Rodell to tag along at a celebratory dinner at the town’s fanciest restaurant. Rodell was struck, not by the food, but by “the mesmerizing, intense luxury of it all.” From then on, despite or perhaps because of the financial stress that remains a constant in her life, she became committed to chasing that particular brand of enchantment, “the specific opulence of a very good restaurant. I never connected this longing to the goal of attaining wealth; in fact, it was the pantomiming that appealed.”

To become a writer who gets poorly compensated to dine at those very good restaurants required working multiple jobs, including, in her early days, at restaurants, while simultaneously taking on unpaid labor as an intern and attending classes.

Things didn’t get much easier once Rodell became a full-time critic and she achieved the milestones associated with industry success. She took over for Atlanta’s most-read restaurant reviewer, then for the Pulitzer-winning Jonathan Gold at L.A. Weekly. She was nominated for multiple James Beard Awards and won one for an article on the legacy of the 40-ounce bottle of malt liquor.

After moving back to Australia with her husband and son, she was hired to review restaurants for The New York Times’s Australia bureau, before becoming the global dining critic for both Food & Wine and Travel & Leisure. Juxtaposed against the jet-setting and meals taken at the world’s most rarefied restaurants is her “real” life, the one where she can barely make rent or afford groceries.

It turns out her outsider status has also left her well positioned to excavate the history of restaurant criticism and the role of those who have practiced it. She relays this with remarkable clarity and explains how it’s shaped her own work. (To illustrate how she’s put her own philosophy into practice, she includes examples of her writing.) It’s this analysis that renders Rodell’s book an essential read for anyone who’s interested in cultural criticism.

Packing all of the above into one book is a tall order, and if Rodell’s has a flaw, it’s in its structure. The moving parts can seem disjointed and, although the intention behind the structure is a meaningful one, the execution feels forced.

As she explains in her epilogue, she used the table of contents from Anthony Bourdain’s “Kitchen Confidential” as inspiration for her own. Titled “Tony,” the section is dedicated to him. But, however genuine the sentiment, to end on a man whose shadow looms so large detracts from her own story. (If anything, Rodell’s approach feels more aligned with the work of the Gen X feminist Liz Phair, whose lyric the book’s title borrows.)

It certainly shouldn’t deter anyone from reading it. Rodell’s memoir is a singular accomplishment. And if this publication were to hire her as a dining critic in New York, there would be no complaints from this reader.

HUNGER LIKE A THIRST: From Food Stamps to Fine Dining, a Restaurant Critic Finds Her Place at the Table | By Besha Rodell | Celadon | 272 pp. | $28.99