In modern college basketball, it feels as though rosters won’t be complete until the ball finally tips off in November. That means as we hit the many offseason benchmarks, the preliminary Top 25 rankings have to be updated, and the latest checkpoint was the NBA Draft withdrawal period, which ended on May 28.
Now, rosters are mostly finalized, and ESPN took the opportunity to post an updated Top 25 with the Louisville Cardinals prominently featured in the top 10.
Louisville grabs the No. 7 spot in ESPN’s offseason Top 25 rankings
Pat Kelsey had an impressive resume of success at Winthrop and Charleston, but wasn’t exactly a slam-dunk hire last offseason. However, despite losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament as a No. 8 seed in March, Kelsey has led the Cardinals on a meteoric rise since the doldrums of the Kenny Payne era.
Kelsey improved from Payne’s eight-win mark in 2023-24 to a 27-win season in Year 1, and now, after a strong offseason of transfer portal activity, Louisville is positioned as a potential national championship contender and a clear top 10 team in the country.
The 2024 offseason was about volume in the transfer portal, with 14 incoming players, but this time around, Kelsey focused on quality to supplement his strong group of returners. Louisville added just three players in the portal this offseason: Ryan Conwell from Xavier, Adrian Wooley from Kennesaw State, and Isaac McNeely from Virginia.
That group, along with five-star freshman Mikel Brown Jr. and returners like J’Vonne Hadley and Kasean Pryor, is certainly good enough to compete for an ACC title, and maybe much more.
In the seven years between Rick Pitino and Kelsey, Louisville made the NCAA Tournament just once, a first-round exit under Chris Mack in 2019. The program looked like a condemned home, in total disrepair after years of neglect, but Kelsey turned out to Chip and Joanna Gaines rolled into one.
Not to mix metaphors, but turning around a program in college sports before the transfer portal and NIL was like turning the Titanic; it took far too long to change course. But when you can overhaul your roster each offseason, especially in college basketball with smaller rosters than football, college coaches have gone from captaining the cruise liner to riding a jet ski.
Kelsey now has to live up to these lofty expectations, but if Louisville is truly back in national title contention after just two years, this is one of the most impressive rebuilding jobs of the portal era.