The Duke basketball program is heading into the 2025-26 college basketball season widely regarded as a perennial national championship contender. However, are the Blue Devils among the best of the best, or are they in the pack of teams that could potentially make something happen in March? Well, when comparing the current preseason top 25 with the current national championship betting odds, it doesn’t make a ton of sense when talking about Duke. <\/p>\n
According to FanDuel,<\/a> Duke has the third-best odds in the entire nation to win the 2026 national championship as of now at +1100. Now, its odds did slightly drop from +1000 after Cedric Coward announced he was staying<\/a> in the 2025 NBA Draft, but the program is still only behind Purdue (+900) and Houston (+1000) on a national scale. Florida, Kentucky, and UConn all trail right behind the Blue Devils at +1700 odds each.<\/p>\n So, when looking at the betting odds alone, it looks like sportsbooks have a preseason “big three” in Purdue, Houston, and Duke, as the odds take a pretty drastic shift after the Blue Devils. A casual fan may think these are the perennial three best teams heading into college hoops next season. However, the preseason top 25 projections show a completely different story. <\/p>\n At ESPN’s most recent preseason top 25 rankings,<\/a> Duke is all the way down at No. 12, which is a whole new tier than the program’s betting odds. Out of the 11 teams ranked ahead of the Blue Devils in these rankings, Duke has better odds to win the 2026 national title than nine of them. <\/p>\n So, which projections better represent the expectations of Duke?<\/p>\n Frankly, it makes a ton of sense to have Duke outside the top ten in a preseason top 25. Although Jon Scheyer brought his club to a Final Four in 2025, he just lost every starter <\/a>from that team. Despite Scheyer and his staff bringing back a few key returners for the 2025-26 season, next year’s roster is extremely young. Almost all of the offensive load<\/a> will fall on the incoming freshmen or returners, all of whom need to take leaps. <\/p>\n Next season’s Duke squad is built on potential, <\/a>not proven production. Could Duke be a top-three team in the country and get back to the Final Four? Absolutely, but a lot of things have to go right for that to happen. Especially with the Blue Devils’ gauntlet of a non-conference schedule<\/a> next season, it’s not out of the realm of possibility for Scheyer’s squad to be fighting to stay inside the AP top 20 come the back half of the regular season. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Duke basketball program is heading into the 2025-26 college basketball season widely regarded as a perennial national…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":47359,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[68],"tags":[402,398,400,401,99],"class_list":{"0":"post-47358","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-basketball","8":"tag-basketball","9":"tag-ncaa","10":"tag-ncaa-basketball","11":"tag-ncaabasketball","12":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47358","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=47358"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47358\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/47359"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=47358"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=47358"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=47358"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}