Photo Credit: Craven Whitlow
One of the most important and reliable things we have in America are the polls.
Yes, that was a joke. A lot of fuss has been made this week about the latest Top 25 rankings in college baseball. The sport is already set up for this, with five major polls rather than a centralized AP Poll like its basketball and football counterparts. That subjectivity was made even worse following a weekend that saw the nation’s top three teams – Texas, LSU and Clemson – each lose their series, with the No. 1 Longhorns getting swept by Arkansas in dominant fashion.
This chaos produced a slate of rankings with about as much unpredictability as this week’s Papal Conclave.
Arkansas is ranked as high as No. 1 by the National Collegiate Baseball Writers’ Association and as low as No. 7 by D1Baseball. The Diamond Hogs are ranked either 2nd or 3rd by the other three polls. Georgia is the top dog in the Baseball America and Perfect Game rankings, while the Longhorns retained their perch in the D1Baseball and Coaches Polls.
Arkansas beat Texas, but lost to Georgia…but Georgia got swept by Texas…but Texas just got swept – there’s really no good way to order the top three teams in the land. The hope for the gray-haired voters is that these heavyweights will sort themselves out over the final two weeks of the regular season. The topsy-turvy rankings extend to softball, too, where Arkansas is No. 1 in some polls despite being the No. 5 seed in the SEC Tournament.
You can forgive said pollsters for having a hard time sorting out the order of those contenders, but the most egregious ranking of the week actually came in the basketball realm, courtesy of On3’s Jamie Shaw.
The company’s senior national recruiting analyst put out a fabled Way-Too-Early Top 25 for the upcoming college hoops season. The top 10 featured blue bloods like UConn and Kentucky, a reloaded juggernaut from last season in Houston and a wannabe juggernaut in St. John’s, with which Arkansas wiped the floor in March Madness. The bottom rows of the list are even more of a head-scratcher.
Defending national champion Florida slots in all the way down at No. 22 – and the Arkansas Razorbacks are omitted entirely.
Jamie Shaw’s Arkansas Vendetta Expands
The team who just cut down the nets coming in at the tail end of the Top 25 is foolish enough – the national champion should always be No. 1 until someone proves otherwise on the court next season. But leaving Arkansas unranked is a decision that leaves Shaw as a total anomaly among his reporting peers.
Shaw is, notably, the same reporter who helped produce On3’s final recruiting rankings in the Class of 2025, which saw Arkansas signees Darius Acuff Jr. and Meleek Thomas plummet out of the top 20, shockingly reduced to four-star prospects despite the consensus from literally every other recruiting service.
Most other national reporters have Arkansas between No. 7 and No. 15 in their rankings, but even those who are less bullish on the Hogs next season still have them in the back end of the Top 25.
Arkansas basketball coach John Calipari brings in the five-star duo of Acuff and Thomas alongside transfer big men Nick Pringle and Malique Ewin. But the most notable part of this roster is the amount of returning pieces the Hogs will have next year – DJ Wagner, Trevon Brazile and Billy Richmond are all returning, as will Karter Knox if he forgoes the NBA Draft.
Coach Cal is known for constant roster turnover with his one-and-done model, and the transfer portal has only made continuity more difficult to maintain. But the Head Hog made retention a priority this offseason after the team gelled so well at the end.
As a result, Arkansas is projected to return the second-most minutes of any Power Five team next season, behind only Purdue, per Bart Torvik. The metric projects the amount of minutes returners will play next season, adjusted for injuries:
The above metric appears to assume Knox is returning, as without him that number would dip down to around 48%.
Despite the overwhelming amount of roster movement across most of college basketball these days, continuity has emerged as a key differentiator between the merely good and the elite. Each of the last four national champions – Kansas, UConn twice and Florida – has had at least 50% of its minutes played by returning players, per Evan Miyakawa.
If Knox returns, Arkansas will be in a good spot to get close to that threshold. Along with Wagner and Brazile, that’s three surefire starters with experience and a returning sixth man in Richmond. Add in the five-star duo and a solid transfer haul that could get even better with one final big fish, and the Razorbacks are set to have a well-stocked roster next season.
So Arkansas has plenty of talent and returning production, which is a proven part of the winning formula in today’s college basketball. These facts make Shaw’s ranking look even more suspect – the sort of stuff I’d expect from a Kentucky Barstool writer rather than a national analyst.
There certainly won’t be any Arkansas folks anticipating the white smoke before Shaw’s next slight against the Hogs.
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Inside Arkansas talks On3’s Arkansas snub:
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More coverage of Arkansas basketball from BoAS: