NCAA Basketball: UConn, Iowa State, Auburn rise in latest top 25 power rankings
By Joey Loose
The time has come for the NCAA Tournament, the greatest postseason among American sports. Three weeks of exciting court action provides the absolute punctuation on another fantastic season of NCAA basketball. We’ve seen times rise and fall over the last four months with all kinds of memories made, and the journey has almost reached its end.
Recent weeks have given us undeniable excitement, upsets, and standout performances in the conference tournaments. League titles mean a lot more in those one-bid and mid-major leagues, but we’ve also seen a lot from some of those middling teams in the power conferences. This past week sits among the most exciting of the entire season and certainly showed us a bit from some of the best in the nation.
Much of the focus goes on the NCAA Tournament, whose bracket will be announced just hours from now. There are still a few Sunday games to be played, with a small handful of leagues finishing off those conference tournaments, but we have a pretty solid idea on who the great contenders are in the sport this season. It’s not necessarily about what a team did in their league tournament or even in recent weeks but the entire picture of their seasons.
With that in mind, we’re updating our weekly Top 25 after a wild seven days of conference tournament action. We’ve seen more than a dozen bids locked up in recent days and many more teams securing their places in the Big Dance. The teams atop our weekly rankings are the best this season while you can expect to see everyone on this list revealed on the bracket later today. Without further ado, let’s start running through those teams, what they’ve just accomplished, and how we feel about them moving forward.