Otega Oweh joins Kentucky’s 1,000-point club. He’s one of the quickest to do it
Otega Oweh has joined Kentucky’s 1,000-point club.
The senior guard made a layup with 6:05 left in the first half at Florida on Saturday afternoon to become the 63rd player in UK men’s basketball history to eclipse 1,000 points in his career with the program. Oweh played his first two seasons of college at Oklahoma and scored a total of 498 points for the Sooners.
He is the first player in the Mark Pope era to score 1,000 points.
Oweh entered Saturday’s game against the Gators with 995 points as a Wildcat, leading Pope’s first team in scoring with 16.2 points per game last season. He was also leading the Cats with 17.1 points per game this season heading into the matchup in Gainesville.
Florida went on to beat Kentucky 92-83 on Saturday, with Oweh scoring 13 points.
The 6-foot-4 guard from Newark, New Jersey has started in all 61 games of the Pope era — the only player who’s done that — and has scored in double figures in all but three of those games. He had led Kentucky in scoring in five consecutive games going into Saturday’s outing, tallying at least 20 points in all of those appearances.
By scoring 1,000 points in his 61st career game as a Kentucky player, Oweh tied Mike Pratt as the 16th-quickest player to reach that honor, according to the research of UK basketball historian Jon Scott.
Antonio Reeves and Oscar Tshiebwe — the two most recent members of the 1,000-point club — both hit the scoring mark in their 60th game at Kentucky. The only other UK player in the last 30 years to reach 1,000 points quicker than Oweh was Patrick Patterson, who did it in his 58th game as a Wildcat.
Oweh is the first 1,000-point scorer of the Pope era, and that was a rarity in the 15 seasons under the current head coach’s predecessor, John Calipari, whose best players were often one-and-done recruits who went off to the NBA after just one season with the Wildcats.
In addition to Reeves and Tshiebwe — both transfers from other colleges, like Oweh — the only players in the Calipari era to score 1,000 points were Doron Lamb, Terrence Jones and Darius Miller. Patterson also played for Calipari but actually scored his 1,000th point while Billy Gillispie was the team’s head coach.
Bill Spivey, who played for Kentucky from 1949-51, is the program’s all-time leading scorer among players who were with the Wildcats for only two seasons. Spivey scored 1,213 points for UK over those two years, a mark Oweh could realistically eclipsed before his college career comes to an end.
Kentucky’s all-time leading scorer is Dan Issel, who scored 2,138 points in just three varsity seasons. Issel tallied 1,190 points in his first two years as a Wildcat.
The Wildcats’ next game will be at 9 p.m. ET Tuesday against Georgia in Rupp Arena.
This story was originally published February 14, 2026 at 3:49 PM.
