What we still don’t know about Kentucky’s 2025-26 basketball schedule
The construction of the Kentucky men’s basketball schedule for the 2025-26 season has been — relative to recent years — a pretty straightforward process.
Coming off the chaos of last year’s abrupt transition from John Calipari to Mark Pope and a slew of last-minute opponent changes and late announcements in the years before that, this offseason has provided a steady stream of scheduling updates, to the point that UK’s slate for next season is basically complete.
But there are still some gaps to fill and some questions to answer.
As of now, the Wildcats have 28 regular-season games and two exhibitions on the docket, leaving them just three opponents shy of a full schedule.
Those three games will be part of Kentucky’s annual “multi-team event” — more commonly referred to as an “MTE” in modern college basketball parlance — and that should be officially announced soon.
In UK’s case, MTEs have typically offered the Cats an opportunity to play three early season games against lesser-regarded opponents in Rupp Arena as preparation for the more rigorous dates on the nonconference schedule.
That’s happening again this time around.
Don’t expect any more splashy names to show up on Kentucky’s 2025-26 slate, which already features several marquee games, but the upcoming announcement of this year’s MTE lineup will include the season opener for Pope’s second Wildcats’ team.
The three unannounced games will all be played in the early portion of UK’s schedule, and at least two of those matchups will tip off the campaign.
The 2025-26 college basketball season has an official start date of Monday, Nov. 3, and Kentucky doesn’t have any games on the schedule until Nov. 11, which will be the early meeting with archrival Louisville in the Yum Center.
One of UK’s not-yet-announced MTE games will be the season opener, and at least one more will be played later in the week of Nov. 3, giving the Cats at least two mid-major tuneups before their trip to U of L in what will be the first major game of the season and should be a meeting of two top-15 teams.
Kentucky also has no games scheduled, for now, between the Nov. 11 matchup with Louisville and the Nov. 18 game against Michigan State in Madison Square Garden, which will be home to this year’s Champions Classic. The third MTE game could fall between those two dates.
There’s also a six-day gap in the schedule between home games against Tennessee Tech (Nov. 26) and North Carolina (Dec. 2).
Other than that, the Cats’ calendar is basically full.
There was widespread chatter on social media last month indicating that UK would play Southern University on Dec. 7 in Rupp Arena, but that won’t be happening. The Cats already have games scheduled for Dec. 2 (UNC), Dec. 5 (Gonzaga in Nashville) and Dec. 9 (North Carolina Central). Obviously, they won’t be shoehorning in another that would amount to four games in one week.
All three MTE games will come against mid-major opponents, which will be added to a schedule that already includes Louisville, Michigan State, North Carolina, Gonzaga, Indiana (Dec. 13 at Rupp) and St. John’s (Dec. 20 in Atlanta).
UK will also play Purdue — a candidate to start the regular season with the No. 1 national ranking — in an Oct. 24 exhibition game and the Georgetown Hoyas in the final exhibition on Oct. 30. Both of those preseason games will be played in Rupp Arena.
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2025-26 UK basketball schedule questions
While all but three of Kentucky’s 2025-26 opponents have been officially announced, there’s still plenty of missing information elsewhere on the Wildcats’ schedule.
So far, the only UK game with an official start time is the Champions Classic date with Michigan State, which is set to begin at 9 p.m. ET on Nov. 18 on ESPN. And even that one could tip later, depending on how long the Duke-Kansas game — set for 6:30 that night — goes.
Everything else is still up in the air, and times and TV info likely won’t be settled anytime soon.
One sure thing is that the Kentucky-St. John’s game will be televised nationally on CBS — and streamed on Paramount+ — on Dec. 20, with North Carolina playing Ohio State in the other half of the new-look CBS Sports Classic.
That is expected to be UK’s only regular-season game on CBS, with all of the other matchups heading to ESPN and its family of channels.
And while Pope knows which SEC opponents his team will play and where — two games each against Florida, Tennessee and Vanderbilt, with just one game against the other 12 teams in the league — the dates, times and TV info for the 18-game conference slate remains unsettled.
An SEC spokesman told the Herald-Leader that league play will begin on Saturday, Jan. 3, and end on Saturday, March 7.
The wait for exact dates for all of those SEC games likely won’t end soon. Last year, the league did not release its game dates until Aug. 20, and that was actually relatively early. The SEC dates for the 2023-24 season came out on Sept. 7, and the full league schedule was released on Sept. 8 the year before that.
Decision-makers at ESPN are largely responsible for setting the league schedule, and that’s a process that includes juggling the SEC tip times and TV assignments with games from other major conferences that have ESPN contracts to maximize the network’s basketball coverage.
It’ll likely be another couple of months before the Cats’ 2025-26 path is completely set.
