The Other Top 25: Behind Jordan Caroline and the Martin twins, Nevada is our preseason No. 1

Over the past month, we’ve revealed our preseason top 25 teams one by one, giving you some analysis on each along the way. Today, we present to you the full thing, with a breakdown of how many points each team received.

The whole thing is below, but first, a quick word on our rankings this year:

You’ve probably noticed that we’ve changed our name from The Mid-Major Madness Power Rankings to The Other Top 25. We did this because of THAT THING we’ve discussed on here and on Twitter a million times over the last few years: There’s no clear definition of what a mid-major is, but everyone knows that schools like Gonzaga do not operate like one. So it doesn’t make sense to rank them in a poll with the words “mid-major” in it. We toyed with the idea of taking them out entirely and limiting teams based on their college basketball budgets, revenues, or other guidelines, but couldn’t settle on one metric that made perfect sense. So we just changed the name to The Other Top 25. Everybody not in the Power 5, Big East, or American is still eligible.

With the goal in mind to get better at these every year, we’ve also expanded our pool of voters a little bit, ensuring we get an even wider variety of opinions.

Got all that? Good. Here are the rankings:

The thought around college basketball seems to be that Gonzaga is better than Nevada by a hair, and it’s easy to see why: The Zags return almost their entire team from last year, when they earned a 4 seed in the NCAA Tournament, and add grad transfer and master bucket-getter Geno Crandall. They can be a Final Four team and will probably spend some time atop our rankings this year. We gave Nevada a slight — and I mean slight — edge because we think they just have more. Literally. Like, Nevada is stupid deep, between the returns of the Martwins, Jordan Caroline, some great transfers, and a five-star freshman. Perhaps our friend Eli Boettger can help you visualize exactly how deep the Wolf Pack are:

There’s a lot happening there. We’ll release our first full in-season poll next week, complete with up-to-date records, changes based on the first week of games, and others receiving votes.