Less than 24 hours after Duke defeated Wisconsin in the NCAA championship game, rumblings and writings about the 2015-16 season had already begun.

Eamonn Brennan, a college basketball reporter for ESPN, released a column online at ESPN.com in which he ranked the top 25 collegiate basketball teams for the upcoming season — a season that won’t begin for more than seven months. The title of Brennan’s column, “Ranked: Way-Too-Early Top 25 For 2015-16,” addresses the issue underlying the content within. Namely, what’s the point?

The sting of losing Wisconsin coach Bo Ryan’s postgame pot shots at both the referees and at teams that engage in one-and-done seduction — either the recruitment of freshmen who utilize the platform of NCAA basketball as a pit stop on their way to truckloads of NBA cash or the signing of fifth-year transfer players who provide a short-term influx of talent, like Iowa State has engaged in so successfully in recent years — hadn’t even worn off yet before Brennan’s column went to the presses.

A clear picture of all the collegiate stars planning for the glitz and glamour of the next level via the NBA draft has not yet been painted, nor is there anything resembling finality in regards to most teams’ incoming recruiting classes. Essentially, we don’t know very much yet.

But since when has a lack of knowledge ever stopped chronic opinion espousers from vomiting their ill-informed, ill-crafted arguments all over a public as helpless to dodge that chunky, blanketing assault of spewed idiocy as I was to avoid being splattered by the blitzkrieg of bird excrement during the great Ames crow migration of about two months ago?

Those cawing disease traps blotted out the Iowa sky for two straight days. Every time I walked outside, it took a few seconds for me to realize that no, this wasn’t Mordor. It was just west Ames. The difference between the crows and the talking heads that have spawned from the 24-hour sports news cycle perpetrated by ESPN is that eventually, the crows left.

The click scavengers known as sports opinion columnists and television analysts, however, are a harder breed of pests to eradicate.

Such a pesky characterization may not be fair to crows, however. After all, they serve a natural purpose, occupying a spot on the food chain and so on. Some products generated by the sports media, such as preseason polls one day after the previous season has ended, are not as easy to argue for as necessary.

Necessary or not, though, Brennan’s article had more than 8,000 shares on Facebook only 16 hours after it was posted. Considering the popularity of his column and similar programming across other digital platforms, perhaps “necessary” isn’t the crux of the argument. Maybe desire is. Maybe decadence is.

Speculation, especially ill-informed speculation, does one thing in particular. It drives conversation. Conversation is a vital ingredient in what makes sports so popular in contemporary society. Digital cable guides are packed with dozens of sports channels, each of those channels’ feeds overflowing with programming based on premature and incomplete debates.

The very nature of said debates make them fertile ground for fervent argument — far more so than a topic on which there is solid, fleshed out information. It’s what sports fans want. Fans watch sports for two reasons: to root for teams they love and to root against teams they hate. Fans engage with media speculation for essentially the same reasons.

Skip Bayless of ESPN’s “First Take” has become a millionaire because of this phenomenon, profiting off of vehement public disagreement with his general attitude toward sports as well as his specific takes. I’ve always contended that the only content more compelling to a sports fan than an “expert” validating that fan’s previously held opinions by agreeing with him or her, is an “expert” disagreeing with those opinions, spurring the fan to annoyance, and eventually, a potent vitriol.

What would the sports world be without cowards flocking anonymously to Twitter to overreact in horrible and grotesque ways to something as simple and innocuous as an ESPN analyst saying how he really feels about Lebron James’ return to Cleveland, or the like?

That’s why where Brennan’s column is concerned, whether he is right or not, whether he should be making the argument at all or not, doesn’t really matter. Either way, he’s giving the people what they want, and in turn, giving his employer what it wants — website views!

The final 2014-15 AP preseason poll was both accurate and inaccurate. The eventual champion Blue Devils were ranked fourth. Their opponent in the title game, Wisconsin, was ranked third. Kentucky, a fellow Final Four participant, was ranked No. 1. That appears pretty accurate.

On the other side, Florida was ranked No. 7 but failed even to muster a winning record, finishing 16-17 and ended up on the outside looking in at the NIT. UConn, Nebraska and Michigan, which were ranked 17th, 21st and 24th, respectively, all failed to qualify for the NCAA tournament.

Texas garnered the No. 10 rating in the preseason poll, but entered the tournament as an 11-seed, before being shown the exit by Butler after the team’s first game.

Brennan claims Kentucky is next year’s No. 1 team again. It’s quite the bold prediction on his part, considering the Wildcats have made the Final Four in four of the previous five seasons and have the best class of incoming freshmen basically every single year.

However, if David Blatt gets fired by the Cavaliers real head coach, the aforementioned LeBron James, UK coach John Calipari may play the role of Moses, leading a mass exodus from Lexington to the NBA. If such becomes the case, I’m guessing Brennan will want to re-evaluate his predictions.

Brennan also slotted Iowa State as the No. 4 team heading into next year, an encouraging outlook for ISU fans to be sure, but still information that should be taken with a grain of salt — especially considering he cited the incoming junior college transfer Darien Williams as being a key factor.

Williams de-committed from Iowa State four days before Brennan published his column.

The question then remains: What’s the point? Why should we as fans care about what this “expert,” a man who clearly didn’t do his homework as far as the Cyclones are concerned, has to say this prematurely about the inherently unpredictable nature of college basketball?

The answer: We’ve got seven months before the Cyclones take the floor at Hilton again, so what the hell else do we have to do?