ESPN's Joe Lunardi Releases Early 2025 Bracketology, 9 Big Ten Teams in NCAA Tournament

Author:
Dustin Schutte
Apr 16, 2024

Projecting the NCAA Tournament field for 2025 is nearly impossible. The 2024 season concluded one week ago and things in the transfer portal are starting to heat. We have almost no idea what rosters will look like for the 2024-25 college basketball season.

But ESPN's Joe Lunardi is taking a stab at projecting the 68-team March Madness field. The longtime college basketball expert is pretty high on the Big Ten, with nine teams from the conference making the field.

Here's a look at the way-too-early seeds for those nine Big Ten teams, as well as potential matchups in the 2025 NCAA Tournament, per Lunardi (Big Ten in bold):

No. 3 Purdue vs. No. 14 Samford
No. 5 Michigan State vs. No. 12 McNeese
No. 5 Rutgers vs. No. 12 Grand Canyon
No. 6 Ohio State vs. No. 11 Memphis
No. 6 Illinois vs. No. 11 Texas Tech/No. 11 San Francisco
No. 7 Nebraska vs. No. 10 South Carolina
No. 7 Wisconsin vs. No. 10 New Mexico
No. 8 Indiana vs. No. 9 Boise State
No. 8 Maryland vs. No. 9 North Carolina State

Purdue is the Big Ten team with the highest seed with an early projection as a No. 3 seed. The Boilermakers have earned No. 1 seeds in each of the last two tournaments.

Rutgers, Ohio State, Indiana and Maryland all missed last year's NCAA Tournament. The Buckeyes were the only team to participate in the NIT.

It's incredibly early to predict what will happen next season, so we'll see how much this changes over the course of the next year.

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