No defending champion has started this low in the AP poll since UConn in 2014

The last time the Associated Press voters looked at a defending national champion and put it 16th or worse in the preseason poll, the champion was Connecticut, the year was 2014, and the team they were looking at went 20-15.

That is the comp. It is not a prediction. It is the only one available, which is a different thing, and Michigan's job between now and March is to make it the wrong one.

The preseason AP Top 25 came out Monday morning. Florida is first, with 47 of the 59 first-place votes. Duke got 10 and Illinois got two. UConn is fourth, Arizona fifth, Michigan State sixth. Then a long stretch of other people's teams, and then, at 16, with 605 points, the team that cut down the nets in April.

The coaches, whose poll came out the same day, had it worse. They put Michigan 20th.

(A team that won 37 games, went 19-1 in the Big Ten and won the national championship is ranked behind Gonzaga, St. John's and Miami by the writers and behind Texas Tech and Iowa State by the coaches. This is what losing four starters looks like in October. It is not an insult. It is arithmetic.)

Here is the arithmetic, because the number on its own does not say how unusual it is.

Twelve champions in twelve seasons (there was no 2020 tournament, so no 2020-21 row). Ten of them opened the next year in the top eleven. Two did not, and Michigan is the second. The first was that Connecticut team, which stayed at 17 for a week, slid to 24, and was gone from the poll by the fourth week of the season. It finished fifth in the American Athletic Conference.

Virginia is the gentler version. The voters opened the 2019-20 season with the champions 11th, and that team finished the year at 16 in the last poll before a tournament that never happened.

So the precedent, such as it is, says a champion ranked this low tends to be ranked this low for a reason, and the reason tends to hold.

Anyway. The reason here is not a mystery, and it has been on this site since the roster came out. Five players started at least 39 of Michigan's 40 games last season: Yaxel Lendeborg, Morez Johnson Jr., Aday Mara, Nimari Burnett and Elliot Cadeau. Four of the five are gone. Cadeau is the one who stayed, and the Big Ten's writers put him and Trey McKenney on their preseason all-conference first team two weeks ago, which is the kind of thing that happens to a team ranked higher than 16th. The voters, apparently, read the roster and the first team and believed the roster.

What is interesting is that the two polls agree on the order and disagree on the distance.

The Big Ten media poll, the one Adam Jardy of the Columbus Dispatch runs, picked Illinois first, Michigan State second and Michigan third, with Michigan one first-place vote away from a shutout. The AP panel put the same three teams in the same order: Illinois third nationally, Michigan State sixth, Michigan 16th. No Big Ten team sits between them. USC and UCLA are the next conference teams on the list, at 21 and 22, and Purdue and Nebraska are in the others-receiving-votes pile.

Same order. Different gaps. In the national poll Michigan State has 1,203 points and Michigan has 605, a difference of 598. Florida, the top-ranked team in the country, has 1,461, which puts Michigan State 258 points behind the top of the poll. The Spartans are closer to Florida than they are to Michigan. The conference writers saw a three-team race with a clear third. The national writers saw a two-team race and a team with a banner.

Both of those can be right in October. Only one of them can be right in March.

The useful part of a low preseason ranking is that it gets tested early, and this one will. Michigan plays 10th-ranked Houston on Sunday in Grand Rapids, an exhibition, so it counts for nothing except the question the poll just asked. It plays fourth-ranked UConn on November 6 in Boston, which counts. Illinois and Michigan State are on the conference schedule. By Thanksgiving the voters will have seen the one thing they could not see Monday, which is this roster against the teams they ranked above it.

Last October they ranked Michigan seventh. By the last poll before the tournament it was third. The one after that, the poll the AP takes once the tournament is over, had Michigan first.

Sixteenth is a long way from either. It is also where the voters put a team they had just watched win, and the only champion they have put lower in the last twelve seasons finished 20-15.

Sources: AP Top 25 preseason men's poll, Associated Press, October 19, 2026 (ranking order, first-place votes and the 59-member voting panel from the AP's poll page; point totals from ESPN's carrier of the same poll); USA Today coaches preseason poll via ESPN's rankings feed, October 19, 2026; Sports Reference AP poll pages for the 2014-15 through 2025-26 seasons and Michigan's poll history; Sports Reference, Connecticut 2014-15 season; Big Ten preseason media poll, Columbus Dispatch, October 5, 2026; Michigan Athletics, 2026-27 roster.