With college basketball's most decorated freshman class in recent memory and a collection of All-Americans back for another year, this season's race for national player of the year should be intense.
Kansas standout Darryn Peterson, BYU's AJ Dybantsa and Duke star Cameron Boozer -- the projected top-three picks in next summer's NBA draft per ESPN -- anchor this year's men's basketball Wooden Award Preseason Top 50 Watchlist, which was announced on Tuesday.
This season's top 50 watch list includes nine freshmen, four more than last season's list at this same point last year.
Peterson, who will miss Tuesday's game against Duke due to a hamstring injury, is a 6-foot-6 wing who scored 21 points in 22 minutes of his team's exhibition victory over Louisville and also dropped 22 points in a loss to North Carolina.
Dybantsa finished with 25 points in his squad's 86-84 loss to UConn on Friday in Boston, and Boozer, the two-time Gatorade National Player of the Year, is averaging 22.5 PPG, 10.3 RPG and 4.3 APG for the Blue Devils.
They're joined by a group of veterans who will aim to push the young guys aside in pursuit of the Wooden Award. Purdue's Braden Smith, the preseason favorite to win the award, is the leader of the No. 1 team in America. Along with Kansas State's P.J. Haggerty and Texas Tech's JT Toppin, Smith leads a group of three players who were Associated Press All-Americans a year ago.
Smith -- whose teammate, Trey Kaufman-Renn (18.0 PPG, 15.0 RPG), is also on the watch list -- could become the third Purdue player in the past four years to win the Wooden Award after former Boilermakers star Zach Edey won the honor in back-to-back years in 2023 and 2024. Duke (1999, 2001, 2002) is the only school in men's basketball history that has captured three Wooden Award honors in four years.
Despite Smith's shot at history, however, the biggest stars of this list are the first-year players with NBA dreams. Arizona star Koa Peat led his team to a win over Florida, the defending national champion, in his team's season opener. Caleb Wilson's confidence has helped North Carolina launch a turnaround following last year's lackluster finish.
Arkansas guard Darius Acuff Jr., Tennessee standout Nate Ament and Louisville's Mikel Brown Jr. are also three freshmen on the list, too.
Players can be added and removed throughout the season. Victor Oladipo finished second to Michigan's Trey Burke in the 2012-13 Wooden Award race even though the former Indiana star had not been mentioned in that year's midseason top-25 list months earlier.
This year, Arkansas freshman Meleek Thomas (17.8 PPG, 6.5 RPG, 4.8 APG) and Houston's Kingston Flemings (17.3 PPG, 40% from beyond the arc) -- two players who were not on the preseason list -- could make their case for inclusion in the future.