With the roster now (mostly) set, Greg Gard and the Badgers have a pretty good idea of what this season's team will look like. After losing 10 players to graduations and transfers, the 2025 squad will look nearly unrecognizable from March's NCAA Tournament team. So how does the national media see them stacking up against the rest of the country?
In ESPN's initial early top 25 list, Wisconsin was slotted in at 17, a respectable spot considering the roster turnover and loss of the NBA bound John Tonje. Now, in their latest update, ESPN has bumped the Badgers up a slot to the No. 16 team in the country, exactly where they finished in the AP Poll last season.
Can this year's Badger squad rank higher than last season's team?
So will the Badgers be just as good as last year? Maybe, but with an entirely new roster it seems impossible to tell. John Blackwell and Nolan Winter will again be big parts of this team, but beyond that, most of the other contributions will be from new transfers. No. 16 almost feels like the ceiling with this roster, with the floor being unranked. It's hard to strike gold twice, and not that every transfer needs to be a Tonje or bust, but completely rebuilding a roster in one offseason is just hard to do.
Still, it's good to see Wisconsin basketball getting some recognition in the early polls, even it is from recency bias. The transfers of Nick Boyd, Austin Rapp, and Andrew Rohde project to be solid, but how the mesh together is another issue Gard will have to unlock for this team to outperform last year's Cinderallas.
The 2024 team only featured one trasnfer starter, Tonje, and this year's team will feature three. That's not to say it can't work, but there's a lot that will need to be fleshed out before November.