Star power abounds in college basketball this season. We’ve got household names in spades led by vets RJ Davis at North Carolina and Hunter Dickinson at Kansas. We’ve got young talents in Cooper Flagg at Duke and a stellar duo in the Big Ten with Rutgers freshmen Ace Bailey and Dylan Harper. And we’ve got big names in new and big places via the portal — Great Osobor at Washington, Oumar Ballo at Indiana among them — to top them off.
None, though, shine quite as bright as Alabama’s Mark Sears.
Sears is the No. 1 player in our annual Top 100 and 1 player rankings for the 2024-25 season as voted on by our CBS Sports panel of experts. The CBS Sports Preseason Player of the Year is the face of a No. 2-ranked Alabama team that charged to the first Final Four in school history last season. And now he’s earned the respect, as the SEC’s leading returning scorer to be voted as the best player in the sport entering the season.
Is Flagg, the CBS Sports Preseason Freshman of the Year, a better NBA prospect than Sears? Unequivocally, yes. Might RJ Davis or Hunter Dickinson put up better counting stats? It’s possible! But NBA potential or previous accomplishments were not taken into account when compiling our rankings. Our list is based simply on who we think will be the best players in college basketball this upcoming season.
That’s it.
In recent years, our list has been dominated by big men who have accrued All-American stats but haven’t quite had a surefire path to first-round NBA pick potential. That was evident last year with Purdue’s Zach Edey and four other big men making up the top five in our 2023-24 Top 100 And 1 rankings.
READ: Norlander’s Top 100 And 1 teams for 2024-25
This year, as you’ll see below, the economy has changed. Sears, a diminutive guard listed at 6-foot-1, is representative of a shift in stardom in the sport. Davis — listed at…
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