Tom Izzo has taken teams to the Final Four eight times, won portions of 15 Big Ten regular season or tournament championships and has one National Championship as part of a Hall of Fame Career.

It might come as a surprise that it has taken him until his 25th year to begin a season ranked as the No. 1 team in the country in the preseason Associated Press poll. But that’s the case, and it came to fruition on Monday.

Michigan State is No. 1 in The Associated Press Top 25 men’s college basketball preseason poll for the first time in program history.

The Spartans were the overwhelming choice with their veteran returnees led by star Cassius Winston. They topped 60 of 65 ballots in voting results released Monday, easily outdistancing No. 2 Kentucky and No. 3 Kansas as the only other teams to receive first-place votes.

“While I'll embrace the expectations, while I'm excited about it, I'm hoping we're still going to remain the same blue collar institution that we are and blue collar program,” Izzo said last week in anticipation of a high preseason ranking. “We're going to continue to preach that. More importantly, our leaders will continue to preach that.

“We do have some talented players. We don't have a ton of guys that are in everybody's first round, all everything, but we have experience. We have very good players. Any success we have is still going to be through two things: a lot of hard work and try to limit the distractions that are out there every day of the year.”

Duke was fourth, followed by Louisville, Florida, Maryland, Gonzaga, North Carolina and Villanova to round out the top 10.

Michigan State had been ranked No. 1 for 12 weeks in the AP poll before Monday. But none had come in the preseason poll, with the Spartans starting at No. 2 four times in the past decade.

“It’s almost bizarre to me because I would’ve thought Magic’s team was No. 1,” Izzo said in an interview with the AP.

Nope, the Magic Johnson-led bunch that beat Larry Bird and Indiana State in the 1979 NCAA title game started at No. 7.

The Spartans won 32 games last year and reached Izzo’s eighth Final Four before falling to Texas Tech. They return Winston with fellow starters Xavier Tillman and Aaron Henry from that run, and they get back another starter in Joshua Langford after he missed much of last year with a foot injury.

That nucleus is good enough that only one voter picked the Spartans as low as third, with four others picking them second and the rest at No. 1. They will be tested right away, too: the Spartans open the season against Kentucky in a 1-vs-2 matchup Nov. 5 in New York.

“This is a program deal and it’s the players in the program, and I’m really proud of them for that,” Izzo said. “Unfortunately, what you are at the beginning of the year doesn’t help you at the end of the year, but I think it does say something about the program and what we’ve done over these years.”

MSU opens the regular season up on Tuesday, Nov. 5 against Kentucky in the Champions Classic. The game will be played at Madison Square Garden in New York City. This will be the second time in three years that the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country have squared off to start the season, as then-No. 2 Michigan State played then-No. 1 Duke in the Champions Classic in 2017.

Michigan State finished the 2018-19 season with a 32-7 overall record and advanced to the Final Four of the NCAA Tournament for a nation's-best eighth time in the last 21 years. The Spartans won a share of the Big Ten Regular Season title, captured the Big Ten Tournament title, beat rival Michigan three times and won the NCAA Tournament East Regional with a thrilling victory over No. 1 seed Duke.

MSU will host its annual Midnight Madness on Friday, Oct. 25 at the Breslin Center. Doors to the arena open at 8:30 p.m.

The Spartans open the 2019-20 season on Tuesday, Oct. 29, hosting Albion College in an exhibition game at the Breslin Center.

Roughly half of the voters (33 of 65) chose Michigan State, Kentucky and Kansas in some order atop their ballot. Kentucky received two first-place votes, while Kansas received the other three.

It marks the ninth straight year that John Calipari’s Wildcats have been a top-five preseason pick and seventh in a row for Bill Self’s Jayhawks, who open the season with the program facing NCAA charges tied to a federal corruption investigation into the sport.

Kansas and Duke open their seasons against each other on the same bill with Michigan State-Kentucky.

Virginia has gone from facing questions about how it would respond to an unprecedented tournament loss against UMBC to how it will build on its run to its first NCAA title. Tony Bennett’s Cavaliers are 11th after losing De’Andre Hunter, Ty Jerome and Final Four most outstanding player Kyle Guy to the NBA draft. It is the lowest preseason ranking for a champion since Connecticut was 17th to start the 2014-15 season.

The Atlantic Coast, Big Ten and Southeastern conferences each had four ranked teams to lead all leagues.

The ACC ended last season with four top-10 teams, then picked back up with four teams all ranked in the top 11.

No. 18 Ohio State and No. 23 Purdue joined Michigan State and Maryland for the Big Ten’s quartet, while the SEC had No. 22 LSU and No. 24 Auburn — fresh off its Final Four run — joining Kentucky and Florida.

The Big 12 (three), Big East (three), Pac-12 (two) and West Coast Conference (two) also had multiple ranked teams.

The Pac-12 could quickly add to its total with Washington and Colorado as the top vote-getters among unranked teams. Washington twice appeared in last season’s poll at No. 25. But it’s been a much longer wait for the Buffaloes, who haven’t cracked the poll since January 2014 but have five starters back and are picked to finish second in the Pac-12 behind No. 15 Oregon.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.