Joe Lunardi Projects Michigan State's 2025 NCAA Tournament Chances

Michigan State’s men's basketball team is coming off a 25th-straight NCAA Tournament appearance, but with the college basketball season officially over, the focus has shifted to next year’s NCAA Tournament.

As has become a regular occurrence, the Spartans are projected by college basketball experts to return to the tournament next season with a relatively favorable seeding.

ESPN’s Joe Lunardi has started breaking down each team’s chances of making the NCAA Tournament next season, as most teams' rosters are all but set. With how fast things change in college sports, Lunardi releases a monthly update on his projections of next season’s NCAA Tournament.

“There is no longer an offseason in college basketball,” Lunardi said. “With more than 1,800 Division I players changing teams, the majority of programs are dependent on the transfer portal to stock and restock their rosters each spring. The resulting tumult creates wide swings in projected performance for the following year.

In Lunardi’s most recent Bracketology release, the Spartans were projected as a fifth seed in next year’s NCAA Tournament. With UCLA, USC, Washington, and Oregon joining the conference for the 2024-25 season, Lunardi projected 12 teams from the Big Ten to make it to the tournament. The Spartans were projected to have one of the highest seeds of any of the 12 Big Ten teams projected to make the tournament. 

The Spartans lost a few players to the transfer portal, the new normal in college sports. However, they also added a transfer small forward, Frankie Fidler, one of the best wing prospects available in the transfer portal. The 6-foot-7, 200-pound wing joins the Spartans after averaging 20.1 points and 6.3 rebounds per game last season for Nebraska-Omaha.

Lunardi had other Big Ten teams in the early projections with favorable seedings, including Purdue (No. 4 seed), Michigan State (No. 5 seed), Rutgers (No. 6 seed), Michigan (No. 7 seed), Ohio State (No. 7 seed), UCLA (No. 7 seed), Nebraska (No. 8 seed).

Lunardi also had other Big Ten schools with lower seedings but were still in Lunardi’s tournament nonetheless, speaking to how talented the conference was. Those schools include Maryland (No. 10 seed), Illinois (No. 11 seed), USC (No. 11 seed) and Wisconsin (No. 11 seed).

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