Kentucky basketball drops in the new Top 25 rankings. Why it doesn’t really matter
Another week of divided results on the basketball court led to little change in the national rankings for Mark Pope’s Kentucky Wildcats.
UK dropped two spots to No. 17 in the new Associated Press Top 25 poll Monday afternoon after beating Tennessee to start last week before losing at Texas on Saturday night. The up-and-down week put Kentucky’s record at 17-8 overall and 6-6 in the SEC with just six regular-season games remaining.
The Cats will host Vanderbilt in Rupp Arena on Wednesday (7 p.m. EST on SEC Network) before playing at Alabama on Saturday (6 p.m. EST on ESPN).
There’s been plenty of attention on Kentucky’s place in the national rankings all season long — and Pope’s team spent 10 consecutive weeks in the top 10 at one point — but the latest poll lost a bit of its luster coming out of this past weekend.
Obviously, the AP Top 25 rankings don’t hold any real importance, beyond being the most-recognized barometer for how college basketball’s best teams are regarded by an established bloc of voting media members.
With the season leading up to the NCAA Tournament, the only opinions that truly matter belong to the March Madness selection committee, and that group offered up a sneak peek into their current thought process Saturday afternoon.
The NCAA’s annual “bracket reveal” show — featuring the actual committee members’ current ranking of the top 16 college teams — was televised on CBS and slotted Kentucky as the No. 10 overall team, making the Cats a 3 seed in the 2025 bracket, as of Saturday.
That’s both a better indicator of UK’s actual place in the college basketball landscape than the AP poll and a good sign for the Wildcats’ future, with Selection Sunday now a little less than four weeks away.
The committee’s bracket reveal took place before UK’s game against Texas, but no single loss — especially in a road game while playing shorthanded against another projected NCAA Tournament team — is likely to negatively impact the Wildcats’ standing too much, if at all.
And in the seven past sets of results from the CBS show, 20 of the 28 teams that were slotted into 3 seeds in the early bracket reveal remained on one of the top four seed lines in the actual NCAA Tournament field.
Of course, Kentucky is dealing with some key injuries at the moment that are likely to negatively affect its play on the court, but committee chair Bubba Cunningham specifically mentioned UK’s injury issues over the weekend and implied that the Cats would be given some leeway with future losses as their ailing players continued to recover.
Lamont Butler, Kerr Kriisa and Jaxson Robinson — the team’s three leading ball handlers — were all sidelined for the loss to Texas, and injuries to Butler, Kriisa and others have played a role in other recent defeats. There is no firm timetable for those players’ return to the court, though UK has not ruled any of them out for the season, keeping hope that all could come back before the NCAA Tournament.
Cunningham, the athletics director at North Carolina, also noted UK’s strong résumé to this point, which includes two wins over Tennessee, plus victories over Duke, Florida and Texas A&M.
Both Duke and Florida were listed as 1 seeds in the committee’s bracket Saturday, and Tennessee and Texas A&M were ranked fifth and sixth, respectively, making them the top two seeds in the field. Cunningham said the Vols were strongly considered for the final 1 seed, which ended up going to Florida.
Kentucky still has games against the other 1 seeds in the bracket, too. The Cats will host top overall seed Auburn in Rupp Arena on March 1, and they’ll play at Alabama — the No. 2 overall team on the committee’s list — Saturday evening. Auburn defeated Alabama over the weekend.
Kentucky’s place in new Top 25
The Wildcats were one of nine SEC teams in the new AP Top 25 poll Monday, and the conference remains dominant at the top of the rankings.
Auburn is still in the No. 1 spot after its big win at Alabama on Saturday afternoon. The Tigers will host the Crimson Tide in a rematch March 8, the final day of the regular season.
The new top five also consists of No. 2 Florida, No. 3 Duke, No. 4 Alabama and No. 5 Houston.
Rounding out the top 10 were No. 6 Tennessee, No. 7 Texas A&M, No. 8 Iowa State, No. 9 Texas Tech and No. 10 St. John’s.
St. John’s, in its second season under head coach Rick Pitino, was No. 9 in last week’s poll, the first time the Red Storm had cracked the top 10 since the end of the 1999-2000 season. St. John’s was not ranked in the AP preseason Top 25 in October. Pitino’s team is now 13-2 in the Big East despite a loss to Villanova last week, leading the league by two games in the standings.
Next in the poll: No. 11 Wisconsin, No. 12 Michigan, No. 13 Purdue, No. 14 Michigan State and No. 15 Missouri.
Rounding out the top 20 were No. 16 Marquette, No. 17 Kentucky, No. 18 Clemson, No. 19 Arizona and No. 20 Maryland.
And the rest of the rankings: No. 21 Mississippi State, No. 22 Memphis, No. 23 Kansas, No. 24 Ole Miss and No. 25 Louisville.
The Cardinals (20-6 overall and 13-2 in the ACC in their first season under coach Pat Kelsey) entered the Top 25 rankings last month for the first time in five years before dropping out after a loss at Georgia Tech.
U of L beat out New Mexico, which is coached by Richard Pitino, for the 25th spot in Monday’s poll. All four of the Cards’ non-conference losses came against SEC teams: Tennessee, Oklahoma, Ole Miss and Kentucky.
