Kentucky basketball could be in for a special season. What about its top rivals?
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Blue Ribbon ranks Kentucky No. 8 with Final Four potential under Mark Pope.
- Florida, ranked No. 1, returns a dominant front line and adds key backcourt talent.
- The Wildcats will play 12 games against foes ranked in Blue Ribbon’s Top 25.
National college basketball analysts like Kentucky’s chances to make a run during the 2025-26 season, perhaps all the way to the Final Four, a place the Wildcats haven’t been in more than a decade.
Many of UK’s top traditional rivals are expected to be in the same stratosphere.
The Blue Ribbon College Basketball Yearbook, which offers an exhaustive look at the sport each preseason, has the Cats at No. 8 in its Top 25 rankings, and the magazine’s longtime editor, Chris Dortch, clearly thinks coach Mark Pope has assembled a roster that should have Kentucky in the national championship picture by the time March rolls around.
Some bad news for the Wildcats? They have a lot of familiar company at the top of those rankings, starting with the first school in the Blue Ribbon Top 25.
The Florida Gators are the defending national champions and will go into the 2025-26 season with a legitimate shot at an NCAA Tournament repeat. Blue Ribbon has them at No. 1.
In a college basketball conversation that lasted more than an hour, Dortch extolled Pope and the job he’s done at Kentucky so far, especially in the area of roster retention, which has become even more important in the age of the transfer portal.
Pope’s second UK roster is built to compete now, but it features only two impact seniors — Otega Oweh and Denzel Aberdeen — and the potential to return a whole bunch of key players beyond the coming season.
At Florida, coach Todd Golden has also found a way to merge continuity with major success in the transfer portal.
“They retained probably the best front line in college basketball,” Dortch said of the Gators. “(Rueben) Chinyelu could have done way more than he did, but it just wasn’t needed. They’ll put him more to work this year. Alex Condon coming back was huge, and they’re going to start Tommy Haugh at the 3. So they’re going to go 6-9, 6-11 and 230, 6-10 and 265.”
That’s a lot of size, a lot of skill and a lot of experience.
Blue Ribbon has Oweh listed as a second-team All-American, but Condon is the yearbook’s preseason pick for SEC player of the year. The 6-11, 230-pound forward is also on the magazine’s cover as one of five first-team All-Americans. He was the Gators’ top rebounder and shot-blocker last season, and he’ll be the top returning scorer from that national title team.
Haugh — at 6-9 and 215 — started just five of 40 games as a sophomore but played a key role off the bench, particularly during the team’s NCAA Tournament run. Both Condon and Haugh are projected as 2026 NBA draft picks.
And Chinyelu — a 6-10, 265-pound center — started all 40 games for the Gators last season and is the type of player whose stat line doesn’t quite reflect his immense impact on the court.
Dortch added that Florida will also be bringing 7-1, 265-pound center Micah Handlogten off the bench. He suffered a grisly injury at the end of the 2023-24 season that basically wiped out any chance of being a major factor last season, but he was a starter as a sophomore and should prove to be a formidable rotation player as a senior.
And then there’s the backcourt, which consists of star transfer Xaivian Lee — a Princeton graduate who should fit nicely in Golden’s offense — and projected NBA draft pick Boogie Fland, a late addition after bolting John Calipari’s Arkansas squad and pulling out of this year’s draft.
“If they hadn’t signed Boogie Fland, I wouldn’t have picked them,” said Dortch, who declared that Fland would have been the No. 2 freshman in the country last season — behind only national player of the year Cooper Flagg — if not for an injury that effectively ended his season in January. “And now he’s got something to prove. He wants to be a lottery pick, and he’s one of those guys that can take over a game any way you want.”
The Gators lost star guard Walter Clayton Jr. — plus Alijah Martin, Will Richard and Aberdeen in the frontcourt — but Lee and Fland should bring firepower to the Florida offense.
“Is Xaivian Lee Walter Clayon? No. They’re different players,” Dortch said. “But he’s taller. He’s a better rebounder. He’s a better passer. He gets just as many steals, and he’s just as good — if not better — as a 3-pointer shooter.”
The Blue Ribbon editor listed several other players — including 6-1 guard Urban Klavzar, 6-4 guard Isaiah Brown and 6-6 freshman forward CJ Ingram — as ones to watch.
“So they’ve got better depth than people think,” he said. “I just like that front line. Plus the fact that they — I don’t know if you can say that they ‘replaced’ the guards they had last year, because that would be hard to do — but I think they did a really good job of filling those holes. And that’s kind of what made me push them over the top.”
Kentucky will play Florida twice in the regular season: Feb. 14 in Gainesville and the March 7 finale in Rupp Arena, where Pope’s Cats defeated Golden’s Gators 106-100 last January.
Other UK basketball rivals
Florida edged Purdue for the No. 1 spot in the Blue Ribbon rankings. The Boilermakers, who will come to Rupp on Oct. 24 for an exhibition game against Kentucky, are No. 2 on the list.
Houston, the national runner-up last season, is at No. 3, followed by UK rival Duke at No. 4. (The Blue Devils are not on Kentucky’s schedule this season.) UConn is No. 5 nationally.
St. John’s, entering its third season under Rick Pitino, is ranked No. 6 and will play UK on Dec. 20 in the CBS Sports Classic in Atlanta.
And then another familiar foe at No. 7.
“I really like Tennessee’s talent,” Dortch said. “I think people would look at me and say, ‘Well, he lives in Tennessee. That’s regional bias.’ I swear to God, it isn’t. I think they’re going to be really good.”
The Vols’ section of the yearbook — which includes story-length features on each projected starter — is packed with reasons why they should be a contender once again this season.
Tennessee has only four returning players, Dortch concedes, but that group — big men Felix Okpara and J.P. Estrella, plus junior forward Cade Phillips and sophomore guard Bishop Boswell — should emerge as “four other coaches on the floor” after spending previous time in Rick Barnes’ program.
And Barnes, 71, could very well have his best group of newcomers in 11 seasons at Tennessee.
Maryland transfer Ja’Kobi Gillespie will be given the keys to the Vols’ offense. Last season, as Dortch points out, Gillespie was one of only two players nationally to make at least 80 3-pointers, boast an assist rate of 27.0 or higher and average at least 1.9 steals per game. (The other was Purdue’s Braden Smith, who is everyone’s early pick for national player of the year.)
The incoming group also features sharp-shooting transfer Amaree Abram, projected NBA lottery pick Nate Ament and 6-8, 265-pound forward Jaylen Carey, who was a load in the Vanderbilt frontcourt last season. Okpara and Estrella — both 6-11 — should share time at the 5, with one of them starting alongside that quartet.
UK will meet the Vols in Knoxville on Jan. 17 and in Lexington on Feb. 7.
The Cats’ first major test of the season will come against their biggest rival.
Louisville, which will host UK on Nov. 11 in the Yum Center, is No. 10 in the Blue Ribbon rankings and No. 2 — behind only Duke — on the preseason ACC list.
After going 18-2 in the ACC in their first season under coach Pat Kelsey — but losing in the first round of the NCAA Tournament, where they haven’t won a game since 2017 — the Cardinals should boast one of the nation’s best backcourts. (Blue Ribbon ranks it No. 1 in the ACC.)
Freshman point guard Mikel Brown Jr. is the Cards’ representative on the magazine’s All-ACC preseason team, and ESPN projects him as the No. 5 overall pick in the 2026 NBA draft, one spot ahead of Kentucky’s Jayden Quaintance.
He’ll be joined by a trio of elite shooters that Kelsey handpicked out of the portal in the early stages of Louisville’s offseason: Xavier transfer Ryan Conwell (41.3% from 3-point range last season), Virginia transfer Isaac McKneely (42.1%) and Kennesaw State transfer Adrian Wooley (42.2%).
Kelsey, like Pope, is known for his running, gunning, 3-point-heavy approach, and he certainly seems to have assembled the right pieces for season two.
“Louisville signed the best shooting class in the country within the first two weeks (of the portal),” Dortch said. “And they were out. That was just, ‘Hey, I know what I want. I know how I play. And here’s who I’m after.’ And they went out and got them.”
The rest of the roster features projected impact players like returning veterans J’Vonne Hadley (a 6-7 guard) and Kasean Pryor (a 6-10 forward), former BYU center Aly Khalifa — a key player there under Pope — and intriguing, 22-year-old college basketball newcomer Sanada Fru, a 6-11, 245-pounder who’s already played four seasons of pro ball in Germany’s top league and will be classified as a junior for his NCAA debut.
Blue Ribbon ranks Louisville’s frontcourt at No. 2 in the ACC behind Duke.
“So they’re going to be hard to handle,” Dortch said.
More college basketball preview notes
Additional points of interest from the Blue Ribbon yearbook, which is available for online preorder and expected to ship in early October:
- Alabama is No. 11 in the preseason rankings, followed by fellow SEC rivals Auburn (13th), Arkansas (15th) and Texas (24th). “You won’t find them in a lot of people’s Top 25,” Dortch said of coach Sean Miller’s Longhorns, “but I just felt like the guards he inherited, with the couple he brought in — not as good as Kentucky, but they’re not far behind Kentucky’s guard corps. So, any time you’ve got a guard corps like that, you have a chance.” Jordan Pope and Tramon Mark stuck around for the first season under Miller, who brought top-100 national transfer Dailyn Swain with him from Xavier and added St. John’s starter Simeon Wilcher out of the portal.
- The Blue Ribbon all-SEC team included six players: Otega Oweh, Florida’s Alex Condon, Tennessee’s Ja’Kobi Gillespie and Nate Ament, Auburn’s Tahaad Pettiford and Alabama’s Labaron Philon, with Condon as preseason player of the year and Ament as top newcomer. Condon and Pettiford were also named first-team All-Americans, with Oweh on the second team and Ament on the third team. Ament was one of four freshmen listed among Blue Ribbon’s top 20 players. Duke’s Cameron Boozer, BYU’s AJ Dybantsa and Kansas guard Darryn Peterson (the national newcomer of the year) are second-team All-Americans.
- The Blue Ribbon Top 25 features 10 teams that Kentucky will play during the regular season, for a total of 12 games. (The Cats will see Florida and Tennessee twice.) In addition to the six other SEC programs, the magazine’s rankings include No. 6 St. John’s, No. 10 Louisville, No. 23 Gonzaga and No. 25 North Carolina. Of the 12 games against Top 25 teams, only four will be played in Rupp Arena (Florida, Tennessee, Texas and UNC). Six will be true road games.
- The Wildcats’ other two major nonconference foes this season are Michigan State (Nov. 18 in Madison Square Garden) and Indiana (Dec. 13 in Rupp). Blue Ribbon is picking the Spartans and Hoosiers to finish eighth and ninth in the Big Ten, respectively. Michigan State won the Big Ten by three games last season but lost a ton of key contributors. IU is entering its first season under new head coach Darian DeVries with an entirely new roster.
- Blue Ribbon projects UK to go with a starting five of Jaland Lowe, Otega Oweh, Denzel Aberdeen, Mouhamed Dioubate and Brandon Garrison, with Jayden Quaintance — expected to miss the start of the season as he recovers from March knee surgery — listed as the top player in the “key reserves” section. “The dude is a giant,” UK assistant Mikhail McLean says of the 6-10, 255-pound teenager. “His hands are huge. He’s a nimble giant, but he’s so humble and wants to get better. He wants to learn about different facets of our game, offensively and defensively. He wants to squeeze every ounce of what he can learn out of it.” McLean goes on to say that Quaintance can guard the 1 through 5 spots. “We’ll throw him out there and just figure out what all to let him do.”
- Ole Miss is picked to finish 10th in the SEC, a place that would likely put them safely in the NCAA Tournament field. That’s the new home of former UK guard Travis Perry, who is the subject of this quote from Rebels coach Chris Beard: “He’s the best shooter on our team.” Dortch, who wrote the Ole Miss portion for the magazine, predicted big things for the Kentucky native after talking with folks in Oxford. “He’s going to get a lot of shots,” he told the Herald-Leader. “I’ll tell you right now, he’ll take at least 165 3s for them. At least.” To put that number in perspective: Koby Brea led UK with 214 3-point attempts last season. Jaxson Robinson had 165 exactly, and no one else made it to 100 3-point attempts.
