What does Vegas say about the UK basketball team’s outlook for next season?
The start of college basketball season is still nearly three months away, but the betting lines have been open all summer. And Kentucky is expected to be one of the top teams in the country, according to the latest numbers coming out of Las Vegas.
While the Wildcats were something of a wagering curiosity this time last year — just outside the top 10 preseason betting choices to win the NCAA title, surely thanks in part to overwhelming UK fan optimism over the start of the Mark Pope era driving some money their way — this Kentucky team appears to be entrenched as more of a legitimate national championship contender.
Pope’s first group of Cats was listed by Caesars last summer as a 30-1 shot to win the NCAA title, 13th nationally but only fourth among teams in the SEC.
This time around, only one team from the league has shorter national championship odds than Kentucky (and a couple of prominent sportsbooks even have the Cats as the co-first choice among SEC programs to win it all).
Before the 2026 NCAA Tournament rolls around, however, UK will have to traverse its conference, where the Cats haven’t won a regular-season title since 2020 and haven’t even advanced to the SEC Tournament championship game since 2018.
Perhaps this is the year?
The SEC will be stacked once again. The latest ESPN Bracketology projections feature 14 teams from the league — everyone except for LSU and South Carolina — and the usual suspects should be formidable.
Todd Golden’s Florida Gators are restocked and ready to defend their national championship. John Calipari’s Arkansas Razorbacks are getting plenty of preseason buzz. Bruce Pearl has Auburn — the league’s regular-season champs last year — in a reasonable spot to contend for a second consecutive trip to the Final Four, and Nate Oats could realistically get Alabama there for the second time in three years. Rick Barnes’ latest Tennessee team looks pretty good, too.
Those five teams join Kentucky in forming the clear top tier for SEC basketball this season. The early Top 25 rankings say so, and so do the Vegas odds.
Caesars has lines for all 16 SEC teams to win the league title, with Florida listed as favorites at +250 (the equivalent of 5-2 odds).
The Gators will return some key players from last season’s NCAA championship team — namely, the frontcourt trio of Rueben Chinyelu, Alex Condon and Thomas Haugh — to go with an intriguing transfer portal haul that includes the projected starting backcourt of Boogie Fland and Xaivian Lee.
Kentucky is next on the Caesars list at +325 odds to win the SEC title.
Pope’s second roster will feature holdovers Otega Oweh, Brandon Garrison, Collin Chandler and Trent Noah, plus one of the nation’s top transfer classes — possible NBA lottery pick Jayden Quaintance and veteran point guard Jaland Lowe are among many key players there — and a freshman quartet that features five-star guard Jasper Johnson and McDonald’s All-American center Malachi Moreno.
And then there’s a sizable gap to Arkansas as the +700 third choice in the conference.
Calipari lost Fland to Florida, but he’ll have D.J. Wagner, Karter Knox and Trevon Brazile among his returnees, plus a couple of five-star high school recruits expected to make an immediate impact.
Tennessee comes in next at +800, with Auburn at +900 and Alabama listed at 11-1 odds.
Rounding out those Caesars odds: Texas A&M (15-1), Missouri (18-1), Mississippi State (25-1), Texas (25-1), Ole Miss (30-1), Vanderbilt (40-1), Oklahoma (60-1), LSU (60-1), Georgia (80-1) and South Carolina (200-1).
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NCAA basketball title odds
Florida ended the SEC’s national championship drought with its victory in April, marking the first time a team from the league won the NCAA title since Kentucky did so back in 2012.
Can the SEC do it again in 2026?
The best hope for the conference is a Gators repeat, according to the oddsmakers. They’re listed anywhere from 12-1 (by MGM) to 17-1 (FanDuel) on the major betting sites. Caesars, DraftKings, ESPN and bet365 all have Florida at 16-1 to win the national title. Golden’s team is no lower than sixth nationally on any of those lists.
Kentucky’s national title odds are basically uniform across those books. ESPN has the Cats at 16-1 to win their ninth NCAA championship, with FanDuel listing them at 17-1 and bet365, Caesars, DraftKings and MGM all putting 18-1 odds on their hopes of a national title.
None of those sportsbooks has UK lower than ninth nationally, and the Wildcats are as high as fourth (on FanDuel’s list). Kentucky generally had odds of 30-1 to 35-1 to win the NCAA title at this time last year.
DraftKings currently has Arkansas at 22-1 to win the title, and none of those major sportsbooks has any other SEC team at shorter than 25-1 to cut down the nets at the end of the Final Four in April.
The national title favorite at this stage of the offseason? There’s a consensus.
Caesars, bet365, DraftKings, FanDuel and MGM all have Purdue, which will play an exhibition game at UK on Oct. 24, at the top of the list with 9-1 odds, closely followed by Houston as the 10-1 second choice. (The Cougars beat the Boilermakers in the Sweet 16 round of the NCAA Tournament last season before falling to Florida in the national title game.)
ESPN has Houston and Purdue as the co-favorites at +850.
Duke and UConn come next on most of those lists. Michigan (14-1 at Caesars), BYU and St. John’s (16-1 at that sportsbook) are also high on all of the betting sites, along with Florida and Kentucky.
It’s worth a reminder that Florida was not viewed as a top-tier SEC team or a legitimate national title contender going into the 2024-25 season. The Gators were picked sixth in the official predicted order of finish at SEC media day last fall, and MGM put them at 60-1 odds to win the national title before the season began.
Meanwhile, Auburn, Duke and Houston — the other three Final Four teams last season — were all among the top 10 choices in the MGM betting odds at this time last year.
College basketball’s top players
All of the major betting sites also have early odds for the John Wooden Award, which goes to the top player in college basketball and has been won by a Kentucky Wildcat only twice — Anthony Davis and Oscar Tshiebwe — in its history, which dates back to the 1976-77 season.
Oweh is looking like a legitimate contender for the honor.
UK’s leading scorer from a season ago is 25-1 to win the Wooden Award, according to DraftKings, which has only seven players listed ahead of him: Purdue’s Braden Smith (5-1 and the favorite on every board), Texas Tech’s JT Toppin (10-1), Michigan’s Yaxel Lendeborg (10-1), Duke freshman Cameron Boozer (12-1), Kansas freshman Darryn Peterson (12-1), BYU freshman AJ Dybantsa (12-1) and N.C. State’s Darrion Williams (20-1).
MGM, FanDuel, ESPN and bet365 all have Oweh among the top dozen players in the Wooden Award odds, too.
Caesars also has early odds posted for several other individual honors, including the Wayman Tisdale Award (reserved for the best freshman) and all five positional honors.
While Caesars has Oweh at 40-1 to win the Wooden Award — 13th nationally — he’s that sportsbook’s co-favorite to earn the Jerry West Award, which goes to the top shooting guard in college basketball. Oweh and BYU’s Richie Saunders — a former Pope player who visited UK last spring while pondering a transfer before deciding to stay in Provo — are each 5-1 to win the West Award.
Quaintance is the +550 second choice to win the Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Award — given to the country’s top center — behind Oregon 7-footer Nathan Bittle, the slight favorite at 5-1. Those are interesting odds for Quaintance, who is still recovering from ACL surgery in March and is expected to miss some early games for the Wildcats this season.
And Lowe is listed at 20-1 odds for the Bob Cousy Award, which goes to the nation’s best point guard. He’s tied for seventh on that list, with Purdue’s Smith the clear favorite at -125 odds. UCLA’s Donovan Dent is next at 9-1 odds, and SEC rivals Ja’Kobi Gillespie (Tennessee) and Xaivian Lee (Florida) are just ahead of Lowe at 15-1 and 18-1 odds, respectively.
Auburn’s Tahaad Pettiford (30-1), Alabama’s Labaron Philon (35-1), Mississippi State’s Josh Hubbard (35-1) and Arkansas freshman Darius Acuff Jr. (40-1) are also among the top 16 point guards on the list, a sign that the SEC should not lack for exciting playmaking this season.
The Tisdale Award list is headlined by BYU’s Dybantsa (+450), KU’s Peterson (+500) and Duke’s Boozer (+600), with Tennessee’s Nate Ament (+800) and North Carolina’s Caleb Wilson (+900) coming after that. All five of those leading freshmen were major UK targets at one time.
Kentucky has two players on the Tisdale odds list: Malachi Moreno and Jasper Johnson, both at 80-1 and outside the top 20 of freshmen listed.
Other college basketball odds
Some other interesting notes from the major betting sites:
- Louisville head coach Pat Kelsey is heading into his second season, like Pope, and his program is also on an upward trajectory in the eyes of the oddsmakers. The Cardinals were listed as longer than 100-1 odds to win the 2025 national title at this time last year. For Kelsey’s second season, U of L is listed between 20-1 and 25-1 on every major betting site, often positioned within the top 10.
- Rick Pitino, the former coach of the Cats and the Cards, had his renaissance season ruined by longtime rival John Calipari — the Hogs upset 2-seeded St. John’s in the round of 32 in March — but appears well-positioned to make another run at a return to the Final Four this season. Caesars, ESPN and MGM all have 16-1 odds on St. John’s to win the NCAA title. Oh, and former UK player Bryce Hopkins — one of Pitino’s prized transfer additions this offseason — is heading into his final year of college basketball, with ESPN placing 22-1 odds on him to win the Wooden Award, seventh among players nationally on that list.
- ESPN also has odds to make the Final Four, a place Kentucky hasn’t been since 2015. The Cats are tied for fifth on ESPN’s national semifinal list, with Houston seen as the most likely Final Four participant (at +225 odds), followed by Purdue (+250), Duke (+350), UConn (+400) and the quartet of UK, Florida, Michigan and St. John’s at +425. Louisville is +550 there, tied for 11th on the list.
- Remember in April of last year, when Baylor’s Scott Drew was the clear first choice to replace John Calipari as Kentucky’s head coach? Drew stayed in Waco, where his Bears were viewed as one of the top preseason national title contenders before finishing with a 20-15 record and getting blown out by Duke in the second round of the NCAA Tournament. This season? Baylor is listed between 50-1 and 80-1 on the major betting sites, well down the list of title contenders.
- There are early odds for the NCAA women’s basketball national championship, too, and coach Kenny Brooks will roll into his second season at Kentucky with a Top 25-caliber team. But the Wildcats aren’t viewed as a squad with a realistic shot of winning their first national title. Every major sportsbook with early women’s odds has the Cats at 100-1, generally placing them in the 15-20 range nationally on those lists. SEC rival South Carolina and 2025 champ UConn are the consensus 1-2 teams and clear favorites to contend for the 2026 title. ESPN also has 13-1 odds on Kentucky to make its first Final Four in program history.
