Way too stupid predictions for 2026
Because it's Friday night and subtlety hit Happy Hour
Any fool can predict, with a modicum of accuracy, what any given basketball season might hold. I probably wouldn’t have called Florida way back last May, but I damn sure would’ve felt a lot of confidence in putting Houston and Duke somewhere near the shortlist and frankly, so would anyone else. That’s not punditry. That’s shooting fish in a barrel of vaseline.
Oh wow you think Houston and Duke will be good at basketball in 2025? Way to take a shot in the dark there, slick. Hey, water is also rumored to be wet if you want to do 500 words on that.
Any turd-for-brains could say “A team that was good last year and has historically been pretty decent might be pretty good!” and then pat themselves on the back and head out for a mojito. We here at Sons of Pepe, Inc.1 pride ourselves on offering the reader more than that. You can find that round the way at any old Substack, or in the dark recesses of Jay Bilas’ mind while he hibernates. I’d rather do something bold.
SEVEN PREDICTIONS FOR THE 2025-26 BASKETBALL SEASON THAT LIKELY WILL NOT COME TRUE BUT HOLY COW WOULD THEY SHIFT THE SPORT ON ITS AXIS AND/OR BE AWESOME.
A team has two coaches — a longtime head coach and his interim replacement — quit and then get fired mid-season. Think Tom Izzo or Mark Few, one of the real long-timers who have been at it forever, just noping on the whole thing a few games into the season… and then Doug Wojcik or Brian Michaelson or whomever getting canned in March when the season is predictably off the rails. Think Premier League soccer clubs cycling through managers, only it’s for amateur-ish basketball in America, and you have the right energy.
When an NIL deal falls apart, a player bails straight for the pros. I don’t mean the NBA; I mean a good player with legitimate NBA potential but also some obvious holes in his game decides this penny-ante nonsense is for the birds, packs his stuff and goes to play out the rest of the season and maybe even the next in Portugal or Greece. Someplace warm where he can play and get a tan and still catch the attention of scouts, and if it works out great and if it doesn’t, that six-figure European contract isn’t going anywhere for a while.
A small league goes under. If the Pac-12 can die a heroes death2, so can the MAAC and its ilk. As more and more money is pumped into the programs falling under the heading of “haves” and the gulf between them and the “have-nots” widens, we will one day see an entire league go out of business because enough of its programs have pulled a Saint Francis and decided Division III is the way to be. This, to be clear, sucks but that is what we’ve built ourselves.
A fight that erupts in practice over an NIL deal becomes headline-grabbing news. This might have already happened, but I don’t mean a polite scuffle during the heat of disputation that was quickly hushed up. I mean “Player X got a deal Player Y thought was or at least should have been his, and Player X got a suspicious broken jaw for his troubles” type of altercation, one where the gossip mill eventually gets going so loudly it can’t be ignored.
A guard wins National Player of the Year. And I mean a guard-guard, none of this “Cooper Flagg occasionally plays the two in our jumbo lineup” guard. We haven’t had a true guard win National Player of the Year since Jalen Brunson in 2018, and this year we have two really good options right out of the gate: Purdue’s Braden Smith and Connecticut’s Silas Demary Jr., a Georgia transfer who emerged fully-formed from Dan Hurley’s wish to have another Tristen Newton wander through Storrs.
A team opts out of the NCAA Tournament. It won’t be a favorite, but the right circumstances can lead here. Say the situations for North Carolina or Oklahoma3 become untenable late next year and either program elects to finish out the campaign with an interim. You can see one or both of those programs sneaking into the NCAA Tournament when maybe they shouldn’t4, and you could also see a plurality of both rosters deciding a jump start into the portal would be more beneficial for them personally than making a university they’re about to leave another round of that sweet NCAA Tournament share money5.
A service academy goes dancing. Next March will be the 20th anniversary of the last service academy to make it into the Big Dance. It won’t be Air Force, which was the last team to go dancing; even a weakened Mountain West won’t be enough to lift Air Force from 4-28 straight to March Madness. But Army and Navy? Navy hasn’t made the NCAA Tournament since 1998; Army has made it exactly never. Both won 10 games in the Patriot League last season and both beat eventual league champion American down the stretch. Their time is coming; get the academies back in the Dance.
A subsidiary of Chaneysoft!
And also drag itself out of the tomb like Lazarus!
Did you know Porter Moser had both Otega Oweh and Milos Uzan on his roster once upon a time? Did you know the Oklahoma team that had sophomore Oweh and sophomore Uzan went 20-12 and got bounced in the opening round of the Big 12 Tournament, never even sniffing a post-season tournament? This feels like it should come up more often.
You shouldn’t have to look hard, since that’s basically what happened this year.
In a just world, the players would get part of that TV deal money as an incentive to see their March Madness stay through.