Ken Pomeroy, the dean of college basketball analytics, released his 2025-2026 preseason ratings onto his website on Sunday. Last week, he also released the results of this year’s preseason H.U.M.A.N. poll, a ranking crowdsourced from his subscribers completing pairwise comparisons that he has used the last 3 years to round out some of the rough binary edges of his model. (Some of you may recall that there is a contest involved in the H.U.M.A.N. poll voting and I won that last year. I don’t expect to repeat!) As has been the case the last few years, Ken waits to release the results of his model to the public until after the preseason AP Poll voter submission deadline has passed. The AP released its initial poll officially today.
The posting of these preseason bellweathers, which coincides around the start of secret scrimmage and exhibition season, has become something of an informal start to the college basketball calendar. UConn playing its first exhibition on the same day is a coincidence, but also telling. Basketball is here. UConn debuted at #5 in KenPom’s preseason projections, and also #5 in the H.U.M.A.N. poll. They were picked 4th in today’s preseason AP Poll.
Promising placements for a squad that is looking to rebound from last year’s relative underachievement. UConn was picked 3rd in the AP Poll (and 5th again in KenPom) last preseason, but finished unranked in the polls, 3rd in the Big East regular season, then lost in the Big East tournament semi-finals and the NCAA tournament round of 32.
Preseason expectations for UConn are fairly consistent across humans and computers this fall. I put together a composite ranking for computer models, human rankers, and Vegas odds across several sites. UConn finished 5th, 4th, and 4th respectively.
We’ll see what the season brings, starting with the exhibition game tonight against Boston College at Mohegan Sun. But Dan Hurley has set the expectations high as always. The team’s motto for this season: “Everything.” According to these polls, the pundits believe “Anything” could be possible for the Huskies this season.
