Mark Pope is still playing John Calipari’s schedule. And it’s a challenge
The 2026-27 college basketball season is nearly six months away from officially tipping off, but the past couple of weeks have been filled with announcements regarding marquee games on the schedule.
The Players Era tournament — a made-for-NIL event that continues to grow — will be back and bigger than ever in 2026, with a new home-and-home series featuring Duke and Illinois revealed last week right around the time that an NCAA title game rematch between Michigan and UConn was also announced for the 2026-27 slate.
It seems like just about every major program in the country has made national headlines for some new scheduling quirk recently. Kentucky, however, has not been in that group.
That doesn’t mean the third season under Mark Pope is going to be easy. Quite the contrary.
Kentucky hasn’t made a major splash with a scheduling announcement this spring in large part because the biggest games for next season have long been set.
When Pope inherited the UK program from John Calipari two years ago, he walked into a situation with little flexibility in future scheduling. And while Kentucky hasn’t made any headlines for its 2026-27 opponents this offseason, there are plenty of big games on the schedule.
Here’s what we know about those marquee matchups so far:
- Kentucky will play Kansas (and top recruit Tyran Stokes, a former UK target) in the Champions Classic on Nov. 10 in Chicago.
- The Cats will play North Carolina in the CBS Sports Classic on Dec. 19 in Madison Square Garden.
- UK is scheduled to face Indiana in Lucas Oil Stadium (home of the NFL’s Indianapolis Colts) on Dec. 27, with that matchup counting as a home game for the Hoosiers.
- Pope’s team will play home games against Gonzaga and Louisville in Rupp Arena on dates that have not yet been announced.
- And Kentucky will also face an ACC opponent for Year 4 of the SEC’s annual series with that league. UK’s ACC/SEC Challenge game, which is likely to be announced next month, is expected to come on the road after the Cats hosted UNC in Rupp last season.
That’s already a doozy of a nonconference schedule. The latest rankings from CBS Sports have Gonzaga at No. 10, Louisville at No. 14, Indiana at No. 21, North Carolina at No. 23 and Kansas at No. 25.
Miami (No. 20 in those CBS rankings) and Virginia (No. 11) are among UK’s potential ACC opponents. A dream matchup with Duke (No. 2 on the CBS list) is also possible, though both sides have hosted two games in the first three years of the event, and each team played on its home court in last year’s challenge.
All of that comes in addition to what is shaping up as another daunting SEC slate. Florida is No. 1 in the CBS Sports preseason rankings, with Texas (No. 7), Arkansas (No. 8), Tennessee (No. 15), Alabama (No. 18) and Vanderbilt (No. 24) also on the list.
UK could play three of those teams twice as part of the league slate, which would mean nine games against SEC foes in the preseason rankings, plus potentially six more against Top 25 opponents from outside the conference.
College basketball teams will be permitted to schedule 32 regular season and three exhibition games in 2026-27, an increase of one in each category, due to recent NCAA rule changes.
That gives Pope a tad more flexibility than he’s had in the past, but with six of those 14 nonconference games already set against marquee opponents — and the need for some matchups against lesser competition to work out the kinks of a mostly new roster before SEC play starts — don’t expect UK to add much more of significance to next season’s slate.
It’ll already be plenty difficult, as it was in Pope’s first two seasons.
A tough road for Kentucky basketball
Kentucky had the No. 3 most difficult schedule for the 2024-25 season, according to the KenPom ratings, which ranked the Cats with the No. 4 toughest schedule in 2025-26. Alabama was the only other program to finish in the top five nationally in that category over each of the past two years.
Pope has Calipari to thank for the inflexible and difficult road.
The former UK coach’s quick turnaround of the program at the beginning of his tenure made the Cats’ inclusion in the Champions Classic a no-brainer. The first edition of that event came in Calipari’s third season at Kentucky, which turned out to be his lone national title year. UK is expected to remain in that series for the foreseeable future.
DeWayne Peevy, who was Calipari’s right-hand man for much of his tenure in Lexington, was instrumental in the creation of the CBS Sports Classic, which began in 2014 and was recently extended through the 2028-29 season.
The Louisville series and UK’s inclusion in the ACC/SEC Challenge are outside the program’s control, but Calipari played a hands-on role in adding Gonzaga and Indiana to the annual schedule not long before leaving for Arkansas.
Calipari, who is close friends with Gonzaga coach Mark Few, added the Bulldogs to the 2022-23 schedule right before that season started. The agreement called for a six-game series that won’t end until UK plays in the McCarthey Athletic Center — aka The Kennel, which is known as one of the most raucous environments in college basketball — as part of the 2027-28 schedule.
Kentucky lost both of its games against Gonzaga under Calipari. Pope is 1-1 vs. the Zags.
Calipari also relented in his long-standing opposition to the renewal of the Indiana series, signing on for a four-game deal with the Hoosiers in 2023 but not sticking around to coach in any of those contests. Pope’s Cats beat IU in the first game last season in Rupp, but the Hoosiers will now be on the schedule through the 2028-29 season.
The mix of already set neutral-site and road nonconference games — four per season under the current arrangement — also adds a scheduling challenge for Kentucky, which needs to maintain a large number of Rupp Arena home dates each season for revenue purposes.
Until those Gonzaga and Indiana series lapse, don’t expect too many big surprises on UK’s slate.
The daunting task faced by Pope in his first two seasons has also been unparalleled in recent Kentucky basketball history. That’s largely due to the rapid rise of the SEC, which has earned a total of 24 NCAA Tournament bids over the past two seasons, including a record 14 in 2025.
Before the back-to-back top-five schedules of the past two years, UK had faced a top 10 schedule just once since playing the nation’s toughest slate in 2007, according to the KenPom ratings. The Cats’ schedule for the 2013-14 season was ranked No. 5 nationally, the only UK team coached by Calipari that finished in the top 10 in that category.
Kentucky played the nation’s No. 76-rated schedule in 2023-24, which was Calipari’s final season in Lexington. UK’s slate ranked No. 42 nationally the year before that.
With the Cats’ 2027-28 schedule already set to include road games at Gonzaga and Louisville, neutral-site games with Duke and Ohio State, a home game against Indiana and the fifth edition of the ACC/SEC Challenge, don’t look for UK to go too far outside the scheduling box anytime soon.
The rest of the Cats’ 2026-27 slate, which will be heavy on opponents from outside the high-major tier of college basketball, should start to be announced in the coming weeks.
