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On the morning after Kansas’ win over North Carolina in the NCAA championship game, I published my first top 25 rankings for the 2022-23 season. We called this my “way too early” ranking because there was so much to be hashed out vis-a-vis NBA Draft decisions, transfers, recruiting, coaching changes and the like. But, hey, everyone loves (or loves to hate?) a top 25 ballot, so we gave the public what it craved.

When I updated my rankings on June 2, we had a lot more clarity. Most of the transfer and recruiting announcements had been made, and the NCAA’s deadline to withdraw from the draft had just passed. Yet, the season was more than five months away, and there were plenty of developments ahead. It was still a little too early.

Now, however, I am right on time. The first tipoff is, gloriously, just three weeks away, and the preseason AP 25 poll is out. I’m an AP voter, so once again every Monday morning throughout the season I will reveal my ranking and lay out some of the reasoning behind my decisions. Here, then, is my first installment. I’ll meet y’all in the comments section. Please be kind!

Seth Davis’ preseason AP ballot

Almost Famous: Florida, Florida State, Illinois, Miami, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, UAB, UConn, USC, Virginia, Wyoming, Xavier

Notes on the votes

• Let’s start with the change at the top. Kentucky was my No. 1 team in June, largely because the Cats are returning the consensus national player of the year in Oscar Tshiebwe. Two weeks after I published that ranking, North Carolina landed Pete Nance, a 6-10 super senior transfer from Northwestern. Nance is 6-10, shot 45.2 percent from 3 last season, and will turn 23 in February. If Nance is a team’s best player (as he would have been at Northwestern), that team is just OK. If he’s the fifth-best player, as will be the case at North Carolina, that team can win a national championship. Hence, the Heels’ promotion to the No. 1 spot.

• Gonzaga also got bumped up because it added 6-4 senior guard Malachi Smith, who averaged 19.9 points per game for the Chattanooga squad that won 27 games and almost knocked off Illinois in the NCAA Tournament. Smith will join a loaded roster led by All-America senior forward Drew Timme. Frankly, you could make a case for any of my top three teams at No. 1. All the more reason to look forward to Nov. 20, when Gonzaga hosts Kentucky in Spokane.

• As a balloter, two things give me the heebie-jeebies: broken feet, and vague timetables. So I bumped Duke down two spots because of the broken foot suffered by heralded 6-foot-7 freshman forward Dariq Whitehead. He underwent surgery in late August, and coach Jon Scheyer has only said that he expects Whitehead to return sometime this fall. For the record, “this fall” lasts through Dec. 21. The Blue Devils should have plenty of time to get Whitehead back to health and up to speed, but as the season gets underway his absence is a sizable concern for a program that is bringing back just one rotational player in 6-2 junior guard Jeremy Roach.

• Injuries are always a tricky variable when it comes to assembling a ballot. If a player gets hurt during the season, I try to factor in how long he’s projected to be out and how the team is playing without him. In a preseason poll, the voter must evaluating players who are coming off long-term serious injuries without any visual evidence. Exhibit A is Houston senior guard Marcus Sasser, who was shut down in late December last season because of a broken foot. Before he got hurt, Sasser was playing like an All-American. Will he be that same player out of the gate? If not, how long will it take for him to return to form? And how will the Cougars fare in the meantime? Given we are coming up on a year since he got hurt, I’m optimistic he’ll be the Marcus Sasser of old. That’s why I ranked Houston as high as I did.

• Villanova, meanwhile, is dealing with more serious issues on the injury front. The first one relates to senior guard Justin Moore, who ruptured his Achilles tendon in the final minutes of the Wildcats’ Elite Eight win over Houston in March. Moore is saying he’d like to be back by the end of the calendar year, but I’m not sure how realistic that is. A ruptured Achilles is arguably the hardest injury for a basketball player to come back from, so even when Moore returns it could be a long time before he looks like the player he was before the injury. But Moore’s absence presents a major challenge for a team that lacks an established point guard and is breaking in a new coach to boot.

Things got worse for the Wildcats on Oct. 5, when their prized freshman, 6-7 forward Cam Whitmore, injured his right thumb during practice. He had surgery to repair the damage, and the school said he will be re-evaluated in early November. A broken thumb is an easier injury to come back from than a ruptured Achilles, but that’s also Whitmore’s shooting hand, so it could take longer for him to get comfortable again. As a result of that injury, I dropped Villanova two spots.

• Any player or coach who tells you they “don’t pay attention to the rankings” is fibbing. That’s especially true for programs that are being ranked more highly than they’re used to. So I will be very interested to see how Creighton and Indiana handle the hype.

• In Creighton’s case, the expectations are unprecedented. The Bluejays’ highest preseason AP ranking was 11th in 2020. Sure, that comes with some pressure, but I’m sure it will be welcomed at a program that has the potential to rival Villanova for Big East supremacy in the post-Jay Wright era.

• On the other hand, I’m not sure it wouldn’t be better for Indiana to fly a little lower on the proverbial radar. Yes, the Hoosiers return four starters, but they made the NCAA Tournament last season as a First Four Team, and after beating Wyoming they got blown out by Saint Mary’s in the first round. They deserve to be the consensus favorite to win the Big Ten, but I don’t see a ton of separation between them and the other schools. You’ll notice I have four other Big Ten teams in my top 25, plus Illinois in Almost Famous. This is probably Trayce Jackson-Davis’ final season in Bloomington (he’s a senior but has another year if he wants it), and it’s important for second-year coach Mike Woodson to give the Hoosier faithful confidence that he is the right man for the job. Indiana has a passionate fan base, but it’s also understandably frustrated and impatient. If things start to go sideways, the pressure is only going to ratchet up in Bloomington.

• Dayton had 12 freshmen on the roster last season, and yet it pulled off one of the most exciting early upsets when it beat Kansas on a buzzer-beating shot at the ESPN Events Invitational in Orlando. The Flyers won 24 games and almost made the NCAA Tournament (they were the first team left out of the at-large field), but they have returned pretty much intact and are poised to compete for an Atlantic 10 title and perhaps make a nice run in March. That would be a welcome development given that the Flyers, fueled by national player of the year Obi Toppin, were probably headed for a No. 1 seed when the 2020 NCAA Tournament got canceled two days before Selection Sunday.

• In my June ranking, I moved TCU up 10 spots from No. 25 because the Horned Frogs’ leading scorer, 6-1 junior guard Mike Miles, had just withdrawn from the NBA Draft. So did Miles’ backcourt mate, 6-4 senior guard Damion Baugh, except now Baugh is dealing with an eligibility issue because he signed with a non-certified agent after he declared for the draft. We don’t yet know how long the NCAA will suspend Baugh for — it could be a half-dozen or so games, or he could be declared permanently ineligible — but in the meantime I downgraded TCU to No. 22.

• I made the case last year that San Diego State was the best non-Gonzaga mid-major program in the country, and I believe the Aztecs are ready to prove that again this season. They return four starters from the team that won 23 games and lost to Creighton in overtime in the first round of the NCAA Tournament. That includes high-scoring super senior guard Matt Bradley and 6-10 super senior center Nathan Mensah, one of the best rim protectors in the country. Brian Dutcher is entering his sixth season as head coach, and though he has yet to take SDSU past the first round, it’s only a matter of time until the Aztecs break through in the post-season.

• Two of the teams on my Almost Famous list have new head coaches — Florida, where former San Francisco coach Todd Golden takes over for Mike White, who bolted for Georgia; and Xavier, where former Arizona coach Sean Miller has returned from his one-year hiatus following his dismissal from Arizona. Miller was the head coach at Xavier from 2004-09 and took the Musketeers to a Sweet 16 and an Elite Eight. There is a very good chance that at some point this season the NCAA will (finally) hand down penalties in the Arizona infractions case and slap Miller with a multi-game suspension. If the Musketeers can manage that disruption, they have enough talent to return to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2018.

(Illustration: Sean Reilly / The Athletic; Photo of Caleb Love: NCAA photos via Getty Images; Photo of Drew Timme: Steph Chambers / Getty Images)