Le Journal

What are the biggest men’s college basketball storylines just past the halfway point of the 2025-26 season? What are the biggest things to keep an eye on over the season’s second half? We are about two months away from the 2026 NCAA tournament, so let’s talk about five major storylines to follow the rest of the season. 1. The Freshmen We said it after two days of the regular season, but it’s even more apparent now: This college basketball season is “The Year of the Freshman.” Look at just about any of the major national title contenders in the sport right now, and there’s a member of the recruiting class of 2025 who’s at or near the center of that team’s success. And that’s happening with guys like Darryn Peterson at Kansas and Mikel Brown Jr. at Louisville being largely limited because of injuries. The success of players like Cameron Boozer (Duke), A.J. Dybantsa (BYU), Caleb Wilson (North Carolina), Koa Peat (Arizona) and Darius Acuff (Arkansas), but there are also freshmen like Keaton Wagler (Illinois) and Ebuka Okorie (Stanford) who were ranked outside the top 150 in their own recruiting class and who are now playing like All-Americans in their first collegiate season. NIL and transfer portal talk remain a primary focus of the conversation surrounding the state of college basketball, which is understandable, but that talk shouldn’t overshadow how sensational the sport’s freshman class has been in 2025-26. 2. Will a Cinderella return this March? Men’s college basketball is coming off a historically chalky March. Not only did all four No. 1 seeds advance to the Final Four for just the second time ever, but we also saw almost nothing shocking during the tournament’s opening weekend . Every top four seed advanced out of the tournament’s first round for the first time since 2017 and just the fourth time in the modern era of the event. The average margin of victory in the round of 64 was the highest of all-time. The madness only got more predictable in the second round, with zero teams seeded higher than 10th advancing to the tournament’s second weekend for the first time since 2007. Power conference teams represent the entirety of the Sweet 16 for the first time ever, and a record low of only four total conferences (the four most powerful) are represented in the second weekend. The previous low was seven conferences. The Big Ten won its first 10 games of the tournament. No conference had ever done that before. The SEC sent seven teams to the Sweet 16. No conference had ever done that before. Put simply, the haves of the sport dominate the tournament at levels previously not seen. Was this simply a blip? Or was it a sign of things to come in this brave new world? We’ll have a better idea of how to answer that question in a couple months. 3. The Point Shaving Scandal For the second time in as many years, college basketball has been hit with a fairly widespread point shaving scandal. An unsealed indictment earlier this month resulted in charges against 20 men for their parts in a point-shaving scheme involving more than 39 college basketball players on more than 17 teams, leading to more than 29 games being fixed. Only one of the teams involved, DePaul, plays in a major conference, and the Blue Demon team in question went 3-29 overall and lost all 21 of its Big East games. The gambling scandals of the last two years have all followed a similar set of circumstances: The players involved have all been lower-paid NIL athletes, and the teams involved have almost all been mid/low major squads having bad seasons and playing in games that wouldn’t draw much (or any) national interest. The question now for college basketball is whether or not this is where it ends. The follow-up question that nobody wants to entertain at the moment is what would happen if another scandal breaks where at least one of the players involved is more of a national name, and at least one of the teams involved is one of the sport’s biggest brands. 4. A Big Ten or…

College football’s orbit has shifted, and the south no longer reigns supreme. Indiana’s victory in the National Championship game on Monday night now means that the Midwest has won three championships in a row, and more specifically the Big Ten is has firmly dethroned the SEC as the kings of college football. Beyond the triumvirate of Michigan, Ohio State, and now Indiana becoming champions — the landscape of college football is littered with Midwestern dominance. Notre Dame has made the playoff three times and was this year’s biggest snub, and even Cincinnati has made one appearance. Meanwhile the South’s place in the playoffs has been dominated purely by Alabama, Clemson, and Georgia — with everyone else from the south lagging far, far behind. Try as they might to claim Texas and Oklahoma, Texas and Oklahoma aren’t the south. Stop kidding yourselves. Just as we aren’t going to call Washington or Oregon part of the “Midwest,” simply because they’re in the Big Ten now. What we’re seeing in college football is that democratization of process has caused the SEC, and the South as a whole to fall by the wayside. Gone are the majority of bagman deals and shady recruiting processes that were only talked about in hushed tones on message boards. NIL has ushered in an era where everyone has their chips on the table for all to see, and we’re quickly learning that the south can’t hang. They’re stuck in stuffy, old thinking, tired strategy, and more time is invested in whining about NIL and boosters, than trying to hang with the competition. The Midwest’s dominance is running through every level of the sport right now. The Midwest runs college football 💪 pic.twitter.com/tBS73Bu1SS— College Sports Only (@CSOonX) January 20, 2026 It might be a small sample size, but since playoff expansion in 2024-25 the SEC is getting absolutely bodied when more teams were added to the fray. The Big Ten’s overall playoff record the last two years is 9-3 (0.750), while the SEC is a horrific 2-7 (0.222). If that doesn’t say something to recruits, I don’t know what does — and more dangerously it’s being coupled with an NFL Draft reality that the SEC is no longer an easy ticket to the league. Trait based scouting has eclipsed coaching lineage or program legacy, which used to be an easy way for players to get drafted, and why we had so many busts as a result. College football moves through the Midwest until evidence proves otherwise. The biggest recruits are heading there, the transfer portal is sending talent up to the Big Ten, while the SEC is on the back foot for the first time in the modern era. The allure and romance of the Southeastern Conference as we knew it is dead, and it’s for this reason that we see so much complaining coming out of the likes of Alabama about the NIL structure. The edge is gone, the playing field has been equalized, and the South has been found wanting. It’s a new world, and the SEC needs to adapt.

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