Goz’s Weekly College Basketball Top 25 Poll

This season I’ll be providing my own personal Top 25 poll each week during the college basketball season. My poll philosophy is ranking the teams I believe are the best twenty five best in the country following that given week’s games. These rankings tip off this week and will run until January, when then we shift our projections to "mock brackets". The complete poll is listed below. (This Poll was conducted at 10pm Tuesday November 29th)

1) Kentucky

2) North Carolina

3) Villanova

4) Kansas

5) Duke

6) Virginia

7) Xavier

8) Louisville

9) Creighton

10) Gonzaga

11) Indiana

12) Baylor

13) UCLA

14) Wisconsin

15) St.Mary's

16) Purdue

17) West Virginia

18) Butler

19) Arizona

20) Rhode Island

21) South Carolina

22) Iowa State

23) Notre Dame

24) Oregon

25) Syracuse

Indiana, Arizona Both Loss- My #2 team and #12 team in the country both lost last week but I did not dump them too far in the ranking. Fort Wayne is likely to be a tournament team this season while Butler is also likely to remain in the top 25 and possibly be an at large tournament team if they don’t win the Big East. November losses are never great but looking at both Arizona and Indiana on a larger scale the early missteps should not derail their season.

South Carolina Here To Stay? If you had to guess which college basketball team last year was the last to lose a game who would you guess? Kentucky? Kansas? Gonzaga? Wichita State? It was actually Coach Frank Martin’s South Carolina Gamecocks who had that bragging right. After taking down a good Syracuse team in the state of New York, it’s very realistic this South Carolina team sticks around the top 25 this season playing against a weak SEC this year.

A Long Way to Go but Could Creighton or Xavier Ever Be #1 in the Country this Year?- I say yes! It happens every season where a team that many did not expect to be the #1 team ends up as the number one team in the country for at least a week. Last year the Big East’s Villanova Wildcats won the national title. Sure the conference is not the same as the 1980s 1990s and 2000s but teams like Xavier, Creighton and even Butler could gain some national love throughout the year.