Gonzaga remains No. 2 seed in 2025 NCAA Tournament Bracketology

ESPN’s Joe Lunardi kept the Bulldogs on the 2-seed line following the transfer portal window closing on Wednesday

Photo by Erik Smith, Myk Crawford

Teams that make a postseason run into the second and third weekends of March are built in the month of April.

Relying on the transfer portal to reload and rebuild is common practice by a majority of college basketball programs. During the 45-day transfer window from March 18 to May 1, over 1,800 players changed teams. That number will likely increase well into the spring and summer months, though some teams already have their rosters set for next fall.

The Gonzaga Bulldogs appear ready for opening night, as the team posted a photo of the roster (minus Pepperdine transfer Michael Ajayi and walk-on Cade Orness) on Wednesday night just minutes before the portal officially closed. The Zags return seven of their top eight scorers from last season’s Sweet 16 team plus a healthy Steele Venters back from his ACL injury. As a whole, Gonzaga has the fifth-highest return rate of any team in the country based on returning minutes.

That trio of experience, continuity and talent warrants high expectations from the outside.

ESPN’s latest version of its 2025 NCAA Tournament bracketology projects Gonzaga will be a No. 2 seed in next season’s big dance. That prediction coincides with other credible outlets that rank the Bulldogs near the top five of their “way-too-early” top 25 rankings and polls. Not much has changed for Mark Few’s program since those early projections, but the same can’t be said about the rest of the college basketball landscape.

Joe Lunardi had the Bulldogs in that same position in his previous version of bracketology from mid-April, which also featured Saint Mary’s and San Francisco earning bids as well. The Gaels, who lost All-WCC guard Aidan Mahaney to UConn and athletic wing Joshua Jefferson to Iowa State in the transfer portal, went from a projected No. 4 seed in last month’s edition to a “Last Four In” team following the departures of their two impactful starters. Similarly, the Dons were among those projected teams to squeak into the field, though they’ve since dropped down to the “Next Four Out” category. 

Even with the downward trends, the West Coast Conference leads all mid-majors with two projected bids in Lunardi’s bracketology. In fact, Saint Mary’s is the only team not from a power conference that’s projected to earn an at-large bid. That would be a drastic change from this past tournament, which saw five programs from the Mountain West and Florida Atlantic out of the American Athletic Conference earn at-larges.

The Big Ten led all conferences with 12 bids in Lunardi’s bracketology, followed by the SEC with 10. 

Lunardi’s early 1 seeds are Kansas (top overall seed), Houston, Duke and UConn, as the back-to-back champions moved up two seed lines following the acquisitions of Mahaney and five-star recruit Liam McNeely. Alabama dropped down to the 2-seed line to join Gonzaga, Iowa State and North Carolina. Indiana, which finished with the No. 1 transfer portal class according to 247Sports, is projected to go dancing for the third time in four years under Mike Woodson as a 4-seed in 2025.

Including the Hoosiers, six of the top seven teams ranked in 247Sports’ transfer portal rankings are projected to make the tournament according to Lunardi, even though four of those programs didn’t qualify in 2024. When looking at last season’s transfer portal rankings, only two of the top seven (Kansas and Alabama) made it to the postseason.