Will coach Penny Hardaway get Memphis basketball back to March Madness this season?

The outlook is good, according to some of those looking out.

On Tuesday, ESPN's Joe Lunardi dropped an updated offseason bracketology, and the Tigers are projected as a No. 7 seed in the East Region at Raleigh, North Carolina. Lunardi pegs Rutgers as the 10 seed Memphis will face, while the winner of that game will face the Duke-Lipscomb winner.

Of course, it must be noted, the start of the season is still more than three months down the road. The Tigers won't tip things off until Nov. 4 against Missouri at FedExForum.

But predictions being made today underscore a variety of noteworthy things.

No. 1: Memphis' second-half collapse last season (a 7-8 stretch over the final 15 games that saw the program go from a near NCAA Tournament shoo-in to not even one of the first four teams left out of the field) has not scared the bracketologists off.

Lunardi has made several projections in recent months, and he has had the Tigers in his field from the beginning. The same goes for CBS Sports bracketologist Jerry Palm, whose most recent update has Memphis as a 10 seed versus Rutgers, interestingly enough, in Lexington, Kentucky.

No. 2: Memphis' roster overhaul has inspired some level of confidence. While it's true there is hardly any carryover (the only returning scholarship player is forward Nicholas Jourdain), Hardaway and his staff have assembled a roster that make it easy for some to envision reaching the NCAA Tournament.

Bart Torvik, among the leading advanced metrics analysts in college basketball, is a believer in the Tigers, currently giving them an 86.4% chance of getting to the Big Dance. Torvik's numbers-crunching projects Memphis to rank No. 19 in adjusted offensive efficiency (115.0) and No. 36 in adjusted defensive efficiency (96.5) in 2024-25.

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A big factor in Torvik's confidence level is transfer guard PJ Haggerty. The third-year sophomore averaged 21.2 points and 5.5 rebounds a game at Tulsa last season. Haggerty's 4.6 projected adjusted points over replacement is tied for the 10th-best among all Division I players − ahead of Marquette's Kam Jones, Baylor's Jeremy Roach and Kansas' Hunter Dickinson.

The Tigers wrap up their eight-week summer workout program this week. Nine of the team's 10 players who have signed were on campus for all eight weeks of it, while the 10th (wing PJ Carter) reported in early July.

Reach sports writer Jason Munz at jason.munz@commercialappeal.com or follow him @munzly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.

This article originally appeared on Memphis Commercial Appeal: Memphis basketball moves up again in 2025 March Madness bracketology