Aztecs left out of first AP poll of 2025-26 men’s basketball season

Human and computer polls apparently aren’t quite as excited about San Diego State basketball this season as coach Brian Dutcher is.

“I don’t know all these other teams,” Dutcher said. “But I know my team, and this is a really good team.”

Not good enough, though, to be in the Associated Press preseason top 25 and no higher than No. 30 in three major computer metrics that have released projections for the 2025-26 campaign.

The Aztecs, expected to be an overwhelming favorite to win the Mountain West, are third among others receiving votes in the AP poll released Monday morning, the equivalent of 28th overall. They appeared on just 17 of 61 ballots, with a high of No. 15. (The Union-Tribune ranked them 20 on its ballot.)

Purdue is No. 1 with 35 first-place votes, followed by Houston, defending national champion Florida, 2023 and 2024 champ Connecticut, St. John’s and Duke.

The Kenpom metric has the Aztecs at 30, Evan Miyakawa’s computer model at 43, Bart Torvik’s model at 45. The only team from a mid-major conference rated higher is Gonzaga, which is No. 21 in AP and No. 8 in Kenpom.

“I’m just so used to it at this point,” Dutcher said. “The Power 4 or 5 conferences, if you include the Big East in there, are going to take every spot (in the AP top 25) except for maybe Gonzaga. There won’t be a team outside those conferences that will be ranked any higher than us. We’re used to fighting our way along.

“We’ll go out there, we’ll play a competitive schedule, we’ll get better as the year goes on and hopefully we’ll be playing really good basketball in March again. The people who live it daily out here, who watch us play, they know how good we are. The rest of the country, they continue to think it’s some kind of anomaly.”

It isn’t the first time a promising Aztecs team has been snubbed by the preseason polls.

In 2010-11, a team that returned Kawhi Leonard and four other starters opened at No. 25 in the AP poll – the first ranking in school history – and rose as high as fourth en route to a 34-3 season that ended in the Sweet 16 against eventual champion UConn.

Three years later, they were unranked (and not even receiving votes) before going 31-5, reaching the Sweet 16 and finishing 12th in the final poll. In 2019-20, they also didn’t receive a single vote in the preseason poll … and finished No. 6 after going 30-2 (before the NCAA Tournament was canceled).

In 2022-23, they were No. 19 in the preseason … and finished No. 2 behind UConn after losing to the Huskies in the national championship game.

The computer metrics may be harder to explain, considering the Aztecs return eight players from an NCAA Tournament team while adding three veteran transfers and a pair of four-star freshmen – a recipe, you’d think, for a top 25 projection.

But the advanced analytics crowd merely writes their algorithms and lets the numbers do what they do. Miyakawa, in a blog about his preseason rankings, included No. 43 SDSU among teams that “my model seems to be down on relative to consensus.”

Torvik has them at 45, just two spots ahead of a Boise State team that lost a pair of all-conference selections in forward Tyson Degenhart and point guard Alvaro Cardenas. Torvik’s model doesn’t rate mid-majors favorably in general, putting Gonzaga at 24.

But projecting performance via computer has been complicated by the NIL era of wholesale transfers, where programs some years flip their entire roster. How do you account for intangibles like chemistry, which usually correlates with the percentage of returning minutes? How do you rate the addition of European pros with no college statistical data?

Regardless, we won’t have to wait long to see how the Aztecs stack up.

They host UCLA, No. 12 in the AP poll, in an exhibition on Friday night at Viejas Arena. Their nonconference schedule has plenty of heft: No. 7 Michigan, Oregon (second among others receiving votes) and one other top team in the Players Era Festival over Thanksgiving week in Las Vegas, plus No. 13 Arizona in Phoenix on Dec. 20.

“I don’t care what somebody has to say about our team if you’re not here (watching),” senior guard Reese Dixon-Waters said. “I definitely don’t care. Whether we’re ranked or not, in our first six games we’re going to have three games that are tough. If we win those three games – when we win those three games – it’s not going to matter. At the end of the day, I don’t plan on losing.

“Every year I’ve been here, even when I was at USC, I think everybody overlooks (SDSU). Then we come out and we beat them up, and they’re like, ‘Oh, they’re good.’”

San Diego State vs. UCLA (exhibition)

When: 7 p.m. Friday

Where: Viejas Arena