Every spring, the increasing flood of transfers (now more than three per Division I team) and improving non-NBA pro options makes it more difficult to accurately forecast a Top 25 for the following season.
Key aspects of rosters simply won't be known until spring recruiting kicks in (maybe also by the G League), the transfer merry-go-round slows and, in what is usually most important, stay-or-go-pro decisions are made. All that dust won't settle until early July this year.
Yet, as always, the "Way Too Early" Top 25s still arrived this week, with predictably big differences between them with so much remaining unknown.
One of the few constants was UCLA, which appears to be an early Pac-12 favorite again for 2020-21 after being picked to win the league this season, but even the Bruins have major questions about nearly all of their key players
Arizona, for a change, is expected to have a fairly stable offseason roster and, combined with its 17-9 finish, picked up a few mentions. The Wildcats were ranked 11th by 247Sports, 16th by ESPN and the San Jose Mercury News and 21 by CBS and Stadium, though they were not ranked by USA Today, the Athletic, Sporting News, NCAA.com or Sports Illustrated.
The full rundown of Pac-12 teams:
Sports Illustrated, which came up with guidelines that included assuming that any top 60 rated NBA prospect would leave, had UCLA fifth and Oregon 19th.
USA Today put UCLA first but didn't list any other Pac-12 teams.
CBS Sports had UCLA No. 1, Arizona 21, USC 22 and Oregon 24.
ESPN had UCLA No. 2 and Arizona 16.
NCAA.com put UCLA No. 1, Oregon 17 and USC 25.
The Athletic had UCLA at No. 3 and USC at 22.
Sporting News had UCLA at No. 2 and Oregon at 21.
247 Sports had Arizona 11 and Oregon 12.
The Mercury NewsΒ had UCLA 4, Arizona 16, Oregon 19, USC 22 and Oregon State 25.
Stadium had UCLA No. 3, Oregon 17 and Arizona 21.
