College basketball’s talent ecosystem is unusually robust this season across teams and conferences and ranging from players aged 18 to 29. Yes, 29 years old. But no team this season has the top-end talent — or in the case of Purdue, talents — as do the Boilermakers.
Two Purdue players landed in the top 10 of our annual preseason ranking of the Top 100 and 1 Players for the 2025-26 season featured below, including star guard Braden Smith, the CBS Sports preseason Player of the Year, who claims the No. 1 spot.
Smith leads returning players in assists and the only First Team All-American from last season who is back in the sport this season. He’s coming off a career year in which he averaged 15.8 points and 8.7 assists per game while leading Purdue to 24 wins and a second weekend appearance in the NCAA Tournament.
Teammate Trey Kaufman-Renn checks in at No. 7 in our rankings to make Purdue, No. 1 in the preseason AP Top 25 poll, the only team this year to have two top-10 talents. Kaufman-Renn led the team in scoring and rebounding last season and was a third team All-American in our CBS Sports panel in April. The expectation in West Lafayette and abroad is that he launches himself into superstar territory as a senior.
The concentration of talent among some of the best teams even as deep as the sport is this season may particularly catch your eye. Of the 101 players, 26 teams are represented by at least two players. Eleven of the teams have three players on the list. Purdue, UConn and Florida have four players in the Top 100 And 1 Players.
Of all those teams, four have three inside the top 50: Florida, Houston, UConn and BYU. Two of those teams (Florida and UConn) have won titles the last two years, while Houston was the national runner-up. So the best teams in basketball the last few years seem to have largely reloaded once again.
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