Kentucky basketball has won five games in a row. Top 25 voters are not impressed
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky posts five-game winning streak yet remains unranked, 27th in AP.
- Computer metrics place Kentucky outside Top 25; KenPom and EvanMiya at 27.
- Road games at Vanderbilt and No. 15 Arkansas offer Quad 1 resume boosts.
The Kentucky men’s basketball team will take a five-game winning streak into an intriguing week featuring two tough SEC matchups on the road.
And the Wildcats will do it as an unranked team.
The new Associated Press Top 25 poll was released Monday afternoon, and UK is still on the outside looking in. The Cats came in at 27th in the voting, up two spots from last week but still lacking enough support to break into the actual rankings.
This is the seventh consecutive week that Kentucky has not cracked the Top 25. The Cats were last ranked the week of Dec. 1 — when they were 18th nationally — but they lost a home game to North Carolina and then got beat by Gonzaga by 35 points in front of a pro-UK crowd in Nashville, and that was enough to boot them from the national rankings for the first time during Mark Pope’s tenure as head coach.
The Wildcats, who were No. 9 in the preseason AP poll, have gone 9-2 since that loss to Gonzaga, with victories over Indiana and St. John’s in the nonconference portion of the schedule before this latest five-game winning streak in SEC play.
That hasn’t convinced enough AP voters to give UK another shot in the Top 25, and the most prominent computer rankings don’t have the Cats in that range either.
Heading into the week, Kentucky was listed at No. 27 in both the KenPom and EvanMiya.com ratings, and the Wildcats were all the way down at No. 40 in the Torvik ratings.
Four of their five wins during the current winning streak have come against SEC teams with losing league records — Texas and Ole Miss (both 3-4), Mississippi State (2-5) and LSU (1-6) — and one of their conference losses came at home against Missouri, which is 4-3 in the SEC but ranked no better than 12th in the league by any of the aforementioned computer models.
Texas A&M is the only team ahead of Kentucky in the actual standings. The Aggies, who are also still not ranked in the Top 25, are off to a 6-1 start to league play, with UK, Arkansas and Florida all tied just behind them at 5-2 in the league.
The Wildcats received 51 points in Monday’s voting, with only 15 of a possible 60 AP voters putting them on their list. That put them behind a Tennessee team that they beat on the road two Saturdays ago. The Volunteers had 88 points in Monday’s voting. St. John’s, a team UK beat on a neutral court last month, is in the No. 25 spot with 133 total points, so the Cats are still quite a ways back from Rick Pitino’s squad and a spot in the Top 25.
Louisville (297 points) was No. 20 in Monday’s poll, followed by No. 21 Saint Louis (286 points), No. 22 Clemson (245 points), No. 23 Alabama (202 points) and No. 24 Miami (Ohio) (140 points), with St. John’s rounding out the Top 25.
Arizona is the unanimous No. 1 team in the country, followed by No. 2 UConn, No. 3 Michigan, No. 4 Duke and No. 5 Nebraska.
According to the Torvik ratings, Kentucky and Texas A&M have played the two easiest SEC schedules so far. That website has UK with the toughest remaining schedule in conference play. And the more difficult games begin this week.
Big week for UK basketball
Pope’s Wildcats can change a lot of minds this week.
First up for Kentucky will be a date with Vanderbilt at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday in Nashville, and the Commodores have been one of this season’s biggest surprises.
Coach Mark Byington’s team was picked to finish 11th in the preseason SEC media poll, but the Dores entered the conference portion of the season earlier this month as the league’s top-ranked team in the AP poll. They were also the SEC’s top-ranked team last week — at No. 15 in the rankings — before a 93-68 loss at Arkansas that led to a three-spot drop in Monday’s poll.
At No. 18 going into Tuesday’s matchup with Kentucky, the Dores are still the No. 2-ranked team in the conference. And the Torvik ratings have Vandy at No. 10 nationally — despite a recent three-game losing streak to Texas, Florida and Arkansas — and that’s enough for the top spot in the SEC, according to those rankings.
Vanderbilt beat Mississippi State 88-56 in Starkville on Saturday to snap that three-game losing streak. The Dores had won their first 16 games of the season and climbed as high as No. 10 in the AP rankings before the skid.
Later this week, UK will travel to Fayetteville for another road game against No. 15 Arkansas, which is now the top SEC team in the AP rankings. This will be the first time that the Cats have played in Bud Walton Arena since John Calipari left Lexington to lead the Razorbacks.
Arkansas (15-5, 5-2 SEC) has double-digit losses at Auburn and Georgia, with the Hogs’ league wins coming against Vandy, Tennessee, Ole Miss, LSU and South Carolina.
The UK-Arkansas game is set for 6:30 p.m. ET Saturday, and both of the Wildcats’ matchups this week will be on ESPN.
Other than Arkansas and Vandy, the only other SEC schools in this week’s AP poll are No. 19 Florida and No. 23 Alabama, with Tennessee, UK, Georgia, Texas A&M and Auburn all just outside the rankings and among the top 31 in voting.
This could also be an important week for Kentucky’s Selection Sunday résumé. Both of UK’s games will count as Quad 1 matchups, the highest-quality games on a team’s schedule and an important metric for the NCAA Tournament selection process.
UK is currently 3-5 in Quad 1 games, with six additional matchups in that tier still to come after this week. As of Monday morning, the Cats were No. 28 in the NCAA’s NET ratings — an important sorting tool on Selection Sunday — and even going 1-1 this week would be a net positive for their overall résumé.
As of now, Kentucky is being widely projected as a 7 seed in the NCAA Tournament.
This story was originally published January 26, 2026 at 1:13 PM.
