MANHATTAN, Kan. – Junior guard P.J. Haggerty has been named to the 10-member Preseason All-Big 12 team by the league coaches, as the conference announced its annual preseason poll and all-conference teams on Thursday morning (Oct. 16).
A consensus Second Team All-American and AAC Player of the Year at Memphis, Haggerty is one of three newcomers on the Preseason All-Big 12 team, along with freshman phenoms AJ Dybantsa of BYU and Darryn Peterson of Kansas. The trio of newcomers are joined by seven returners in BYU's Richie Saunders, Houston's Emanuel Sharp, Joseph Tugler and Milos Uzan, Iowa State's Tamin Lipsey and Texas Tech's Christian Anderson and JT Toppin.
Dybantsa, Uzan, Peterson and Toppin were all unanimous selections.
Toppin and Peterson were named the Preseason Player and Freshman of the Year, while Toppin's teammate LeJuan Watts was selected as the Preseason Newcomer of the Year.
K-State was picked ninth in the 16-team preseason poll with 117 points, just three points behind eighth-place Cincinnati and 27 points ahead of 10th-place TCU.
Reigning regular-season and tournament champion Houston was selected first with 224 points and 14 of the 16 first-place votes followed by second-place BYU (204 points, one first-place vote) and third-place Texas Tech (200 points). The rest of the top-7 included Arizona (179 points, one first-place vote), Iowa State (170), Kansas (163) and Baylor (137).
The rest of the preseason poll included eighth-place Cincinnati (120) followed by K-State, TCU, West Virginia, Oklahoma State, Utah, UCF, Colorado and Arizona State.
Haggerty's selection marks the second straight year that a Wildcat has been named to the preseason all-conference team (Coleman Hawkins, 2024) by the league coaches. He is one of nine players in school history to be chosen for preseason all-conference honors dating to Manny Dies in 1998-99. Others include Jacob Pullen and Curtis Kelly in 2010-11, Rodney McGruder in 2012-13 and Marcus Foster in 2014-15 and Barry Brown Jr. and Dean Wade in 2018-19.
Haggerty is coming off a career year in 2024-25, in which, he became the first Division I player since Ja Morant in 2018-19 to average 21.5 points, 5.5 rebounds, 3.5 assists and 1.5 steals to go with 6.5 free throws per game. He ranked third nationally in both scoring (21.7 ppg.) and total points (759), while his 759 points were an AAC single-season record and the most since Dajuan Wagner (762) set the school single-season record in 2001-02. He became the first Memphis Tiger since 2008 to be named an AP All-American, while he was selected as the AAC Player of the Year, First Team All-AAC and the Most Outstanding Player of the 2025 AAC Championship.
K-State will play the first of two exhibition games on Friday, Oct. 24 at Missouri before hosting Division II foe Newman the following Friday (Oct. 31) at 7 p.m. The season opener is set for Tuesday, Nov. 4 against UNC Greensboro. Game times and TV designations were released on Tuesday (Oct. 14).