For all intents and purposes, the list starts at No. 2 because there was no intelligent way for anybody on our panel to vote anybody other than Zach Edey as college basketball’s best player heading into the 2023-24 season. He’s the reigning CBS Sports National Player of the Year, a statistical monster and the centerpiece of the Purdue team ranked third in the preseason Associated Press Top 25 poll. Point being that the Boilermakers’ fourth-year star checks every box necessary, at least on paper, to become the first back-to-back Wooden Award winner since Virginia’s Ralph Sampson took the honor in both 1982 and 1983.
Will Edey repeat?
That’s obviously impossible to say because any number of things could derail his attempt — among them an injury or the emergence of someone who could pass him as a POY candidate the same way Edey passed the 2021-22 CBS Sports National Player of the Year, Kentucky’s Oscar Tshiebwe, as a POY candidate last season. Stuff like that is always hard to predict — but it does happen. So while it’s true that Edey is the undeniable POY favorite heading into the season, and clearly worthy of the No. 1 spot on the CBS Sports list of the Top 100 And 1 players in college basketball, anybody in the top 10 could theoretically emerge as a real challenger to Edey if they make an individual jump that coincides with the type of team success POY voters typically prefer and often require.
As a reminder, these rankings do not consider NBA potential or previous accomplishments (other than how previous accomplishments usually serve as indicators of future success). This is simply a ranking of the 101 men we collectively believe will be the best 101 college basketball players this season. Nothing more. Nothing less.
And the thing you’ll likely notice first is that the list is dominated at the top by frontcourt players, which is a byproduct of how traditional bigs generate very little interest as…
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