KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Last season might always be remembered for what a freshman did at Duke, specifically the way Cooper Flagg produced a historically unprecedented one-and-only season of college basketball while becoming the youngest-ever Wooden Award winner. But, broadly speaking, it wasn’t a great freshman class filled with elite prospects accomplishing much.
Dylan Harper and Ace Bailey both missed the NCAA Tournament at Rutgers. VJ Edgecombe played for a Baylor team that spent most of the season unranked. Tre Johnson played for a Texas team that was never ranked again after a season-opening loss to Ohio State. Jalil Bathea was whatever on a bad team at Miami. Ian Jackson and Drake Powell played for an underachieving team at North Carolina. Jayden Quaintance played for an Arizona State team that finished 13-20.
You get the point.
In the end, Flagg was the only freshman who emerged as a consensus All-American. Rest assured, that will not be the case this season.
Because this freshman class is loaded.
As evidence, I present Kyle Boone’s latest 2026 NBA Mock Draft, where the first eight picks are all freshmen college basketball players, each of whom is on a team expected to make the 2026 NCAA Tournament. And, according to a poll conducted among CBS Sports writers and analysts, the best of the bunch will be Darryn Peterson, the 6-foot-6 guard at Kansas who has been voted the CBS Sports Preseason National Freshman of the Year.
I sat down with him Wednesday inside the T-Mobile Center at Big 12 Media Day. Among other things, I asked Peterson what it’s like to hear his coach, Naismith Memorial Hall of Famer Bill Self, describe him as the most-talented and most-ready freshman he’s ever coached, even though Self once coached the No. 1 overall pick in the 2014 NBA Draft, Andrew Wiggins, and the 2023 NBA MVP, Joel Embiid.
“It’s another one of those things that I kind of just gotta embrace now,”…
..
