Culture
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 |
SEC |
|
|
3 |
Big East |
|
|
4 |
Big 12 |
|
|
5 |
Big 12 |
|
|
6 |
West Coast |
|
|
7 |
ACC |
|
|
8 |
Big 12 |
|
|
9 |
ACC |
|
|
10 |
Big 12 |
|
|
11 |
SEC |
|
|
12 |
SEC |
|
|
13 |
SEC |
|
|
14 |
Big Ten |
|
|
15 |
Big East |
|
|
16 |
SEC |
|
|
17 |
Big Ten |
|
|
18 |
Big East |
|
|
19 |
SEC |
|
|
20 |
Big 12 |
|
|
21 |
SEC |
|
|
22 |
Big Ten |
|
|
23 |
SEC |
|
|
24 |
SEC |
|
|
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)
Here we are on Day 4 of the Poetry Challenge, looking up, again, at the sky. (If you’ve just arrived, click here to catch up.)
We’ve considered “The More Loving One” as a witty, teasing love poem, and also peeked into the life of its author, W.H. Auden, to see what it might have meant to him. But maybe it’s time to take this poem at face value, as a meditation on our place in the universe.
You can read the whole poem here, but to recap: We start by admiring the stars even though they don’t feel the same way (or any way, really) about us. Then we wonder … do we care about them all that much? At last, we imagine them extinguished, leaving an emptiness that we tell ourselves would be just fine. Eventually.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Tracy K. Smith, poet
The poem resolves with a sigh that seems to linger, as if the poem didn’t quite want to end. Unlike the concluding lines of the previous stanzas, all of which clocked in at precisely eight syllables, the last line of the last one extends to nine. That may sound trivial, but we know that Auden counted his syllables carefully.
And it isn’t hard to identify the extra particle, the one tweezed in among the others. Auden could just as well have written, “Though this might take a little time.”
That would have maintained the pattern without altering the meaning. The “me” is implied. Adding it might seem redundant. Which is exactly why Auden does it.
Though this might take me a little time.
W.H. Auden, poet
That scant word makes the poem last a little longer. It also emphasizes the human presence of the speaker, a person whose perceptions and feelings are what this is finally all about. He is asking for patience, for grace, as he adjusts his eyes and heart to a stark new situation.
But how much time is “a little”? The split second it takes to utter that extra, unstressed “me”? However much is needed to heal all proverbial wounds? Or are we thinking in astronomical measures, as those stars invite us to suppose? In that case, it might take our poor stargazer more time than he has. Millions of years. Hundreds of millions!
What does it mean to exist as a solitary being in such a vast, incomprehensible cosmos? This may have been an especially timely question when this poem was written; early versions date from 1957, the year the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, marking the beginning of the space age. But poets have been looking at the sky for a very long time.
Some find comforting news of heaven, like William Wordsworth:
The stars are mansions built by Nature’s hand,
And, haply, there the spirits of the blest
Dwell, clothed in radiance, their immortal vest’
Others, like Ada Limón, see the projection of our own curiosity:
Arching under the night sky inky
with black expansiveness, we point
to the planets we know, we
pin quick wishes on stars.
Occasionally a poet (Stephen Crane in this case) will hear an answer that makes Auden’s silent stars seem kind:
A man said to the universe:
“Sir, I exist!”
“However,” replied the universe,
“The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.”
Auden himself came back to the subject a dozen years after “The More Loving One,” in a poem called “Moon Landing,” which ambivalently hailed the Apollo II mission as a “phallic triumph,” “a grand gesture” of male self-regard. And while he acknowledges the spirit of adventure behind the mission, he doesn’t admire the moon enough to want to see it up close:
Worth going to see? I can well believe it.
Worth seeing? Mneh! I once rode through a desert
and was not charmed
He’d rather contemplate the moon above him — one who “still queens the Heavens” — than tread like Neil Armstrong on its dusty, lifeless surface. The feats of NASA and its astronauts belong to a world of science, politics and media spectacle; Auden prefers the realm of mythology and aesthetics.
He’s in good poetic company. In “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” Walt Whitman, at a lecture, finds himself “tired and sick” of charts and diagrams and scientific discourse.
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.
He did not give a damn if they gave a damn.
For Auden, as for Whitman, demystifying the stars risks stripping them of their poetry. A sense of wonder flickers through “The More Loving One,” along with the wit and the romantic weariness. The poem concludes with an almost defiant commitment to awe, the search for sublimity in the heavens.
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.
Matthew McConaughey, actor and poet
Stars or no stars, what matters is the attitude of the person below: receptive, yearning, more in love than he may be willing to admit, even if — or indeed because — he doesn’t quite know what it is he’s worshiping.
As we approach the end of the poem, our own feelings might be in a bit of tangle: admiration, amusement and something else that’s harder to pin down in words or themes. A feeling that, having spent time with a poem largely about solitude, we are less alone.
Let’s nail down those tricky last lines, and come back tomorrow to talk about the whole thing.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.
Your task today: Learn the final stanza!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
The result has been a terrible irony for a country that was founded as a refuge from intolerance: “How is it that the appeal to humanitarianism, tolerance, the rule of law and protection of minorities that characterized the beginning of Jewish self-emancipation gradually acquired all the traits of the relentless, remorseless and increasingly racist ethnonationalisms from which Zionism sought to liberate European Jewry?”
To answer this painful question, Bartov uses all the tools at his disposal, weaving together history, personal anecdotes, even some literary criticism, including a close reading of a poem — by Hayim Nahman Bialik and known to “every Israeli schoolchild” — about the perils of vengeance that has been misinterpreted and warped for political ends. Bartov writes unsparingly about Hamas’s murderous attacks, in which about 1,200 Israelis were killed and about 250 others taken hostage, which he calls an unequivocal “war crime and a crime against humanity.” It was a “slaughter of innocents” that “evoked collective memories of massacres and the Holocaust.”
Indeed, in a May 2024 poll of Israelis that he cites, more than half of the respondents said Oct. 7 could be compared to the Holocaust, and the Israeli media repeatedly depicted the massacre as a pogrom. Bartov understands why — for traumatized people, new traumas will revive old ones — but he maintains that the label is a category mistake. Israel is a state; it has an army, laws and government. A pogrom “is a mob attack, condoned or supported by the state authorities, against a minority lacking any attributes of a state.” (“To be sure,” he adds, “pogroms have occurred within the territories controlled by Israel, but when they take place, they were and are being carried out, with increasing frequency and ferocity, by settlers in the West Bank.”)
Israel doesn’t have a constitution. After its founding, its government was supposed to codify the protection of religious freedom and minority rights, but efforts to adopt a constitution were waylaid and arguably thwarted by political figures like David Ben-Gurion, the country’s first prime minister. Bartov believes that a constitution could have made Zionism “superfluous” after it succeeded in establishing a state that could be a refuge for Jews. Citizens could have turned toward the task of building a “just society” that aimed at “peace, truth and reconciliation with the Palestinians.”
This sounds nice, if fanciful; constitutions don’t magically prevent authoritarianism. Not to mention that attacks by surrounding Arab states did nothing to alleviate Israelis’ sense that they were constantly embattled.
Now that we’ve memorized the first half of our poem, let’s learn a little more about the man who wrote it. (Haven’t memorized anything yet? Click here to start at the beginning.)
For most of his life, Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) was a star. He was widely read, quoted, argued over and gossiped about, achieving a level of fame that few writers now — and not many then — could contemplate. His New York Times obituary did not hesitate to call him “the foremost poet of his generation.”
Celebrity of that kind is ephemeral, but Auden’s words have continued to circulate in the half century since his death. Maybe you’ve heard some of them before. In the 1994 film “Four Weddings and a Funeral,” his poem “Funeral Blues” is recited by Matthew (John Hannah) over the casket of his lover, Gareth (Simon Callow).
In the Gen-X touchstone “Before Sunrise” (1995), Jesse (Ethan Hawke) regales Celine (Julie Delpy) with an impression of Dylan Thomas reading Auden’s “As I Walked Out One Evening.”
In both these scenes, the characters use Auden’s poetry to give voice to a longing for which they otherwise might not have words. Auden’s poetry is often useful in that way. It speaks to recognizable human occasions, and it isn’t always all about him.
“The More Loving One” might not be something you’d quote at a funeral or on a date, but it is almost effortlessly quotable — the perfect expression of a thought you never knew you had:
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
Ken Burns, filmmaker
The word “I” occurs five times in this stanza, but we don’t know much about the person speaking. His personality is camouflaged and revealed by craft.
Auden, born in the northern English cathedral city of York, began practicing that craft as a schoolboy, and honed it at Oxford. Not long after graduating in 1928, he was anointed by critics and readers as the great hope of modern English poetry. A charismatic, divisive figure, he gathered acolytes, imitators and haters.
He swam in the intellectual and ideological crosscurrents of the 1930s, drawing Marxism, psychoanalysis and mystical nationalism into his writing. Assimilating a daunting array of literary influences — Old English and Ancient Greek, French chansons and Icelandic sagas — he forged a poetic personality that was bold, confiding and seductive.
His love poems of that era were candid, discreet dispatches from a calendar of feverish entanglements, wrenching breakups and one-night stands, usually with other men. He also wrote about the feverish politics of the time — class conflict; the rise of fascism; the Spanish Civil War — in ringing rhetoric he later disavowed.
In 1939 Auden moved to America, acquiring U.S. citizenship after World War II. In New York he fell in love with Chester Kallman, a young American writer who became his life partner.
It was a complicated relationship, starting as a passionate affair and enduring through decades of domestic companionship and creative collaboration. Kallman’s refusal to be sexually exclusive wounded Auden, a dynamic that poignantly shades this poem’s most memorable couplet:
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.
Yiyun Li, writer
In America, Auden distanced himself from the radical politics of his earlier career and embraced Anglican Christianity. His intellectual preoccupations shifted toward religion and existentialism — to the kinds of big questions we think about late at night, or when we look to the sky.
Making the leap from wunderkind to grand old man without seeming to stop in middle age, he became a mentor for several generations of younger poets. He was a prolific and punctual contributor of reviews and essays to various publications, including this one, for which he wrote a rave of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Fellowship of the Ring” in 1954.
Through it all, Auden devoted fanatical attention to the finer points of poetic technique. His notebooks are full of numbers, word lists and markings that show just how deep this commitment went. He counted every syllable, measured every stress.
He gathered rhymes and other words with a lexicographer’s zeal and a crossword puzzler’s precision.
The third stanza of “The More Loving One” is a miniature showcase of Auden’s skill. Of the four epigrams arrayed before us, it may be the most technically perfect.
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.
W.H. Auden, poet
The rhythm is flawless, without an extra syllable or an accent out of place. The grammar is also fastidious. Here is a single sentence, springloaded with equivocation, beginning with one idea and sliding toward its opposite.
This quatrain is the poem’s ideal formal representation of itself, a kind of proof of concept: four lines of impeccable iambic tetrameter in an AABB rhyme scheme. The by-the-book regularity of this stanza should give you a leg up in memorizing it, and you can test yourself below!
But the rest of the poem is an argument against perfection, just as it is a celebration of uncertainty and humility — as we’ll see tomorrow.
Play a game to learn it by heart. Need more practice? Listen to Ada Limón, Matthew McConaughey, W.H. Auden and others recite our poem.
Question 1/6
Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Your first task: Learn the first two lines!
Let’s start with the first couplet in this stanza. Fill in the rhyming words.
Ready for another round? Try your hand at the 2025 Poetry Challenge.
Edited by Gregory Cowles, Alicia DeSantis and Nick Donofrio. Additional editing by Emily Eakin,
Joumana Khatib, Emma Lumeij and Miguel Salazar. Design and development by Umi Syam. Additional
game design by Eden Weingart. Video editing by Meg Felling. Photo editing by Erica Ackerberg.
Illustration art direction by Tala Safie.
Illustrations by Daniel Barreto.
Text and audio recording of “The More Loving One,” by W.H. Auden, copyright © by the Estate of
W.H. Auden. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd. Photograph accompanying Auden recording
from Imagno/Getty Images.
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