Taking an early look at UK’s NCAA tourney position: It’s better than you’d think
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky rebounds to sit inside top 25 in NET, Pomeroy and T-Rank as of 2025.
- UK holds one Quad 1 win; SEC schedule offers 11 regular-season Quad 1 chances.
- Roster depth and shot-making remain open questions despite key players' returns.
Had Kentucky lost its men’s basketball game to St. John’s last Saturday, I planned to write that it was far from certain that Mark Pope’s Wildcats were going to be participating in the 2026 NCAA Tournament.
UK did not lose to Rick Pitino’s Red Storm, of course, coming from seven down at halftime to win by 12, 78-66, in the CBS Sports Classic in Atlanta.
Now, even though the Cats spent a good bit of November and December being considered one of men’s college basketball’s biggest disappointments, Kentucky (8-4, 0-0 SEC) appears to be in surprisingly strong position as we begin to look toward March Madness, 2026.
After losing their first four games against high-profile opposition this season, the Cats have scored back-to-back victories over Indiana and St. John’s.
Buoyed by the return from injuries of big man Jayden Quaintance, power forward Mouhamed Dioubate and point guard Jaland Lowe, UK played its best half of the 2025-26 campaign to date in rallying past then-No. 22 St. John’s.
In the big picture, Kentucky’s dispiriting showings in losses at Louisville and to Michigan State, North Carolina and Gonzaga have not damaged UK’s standing in the college hoops power rankings to nearly the extent one might have expected.
In the NCAA’s NET Rankings, Kentucky stood No. 22 through games of Sunday. UK was No. 18 in the Pomeroy Ratings and No. 23 in the T-Rank metric.
Those power rankings suggest that, if Selection Sunday were this week, UK would be in line for a higher seeding than the No. 9 that ESPN.com’s Joe Lunardi assigned to the Wildcats in his most recent (Dec. 16) bracketology.
UK’s neutral-court victory over St. John’s, No. 28 in the NET Rankings, seems likely to hold up as a Quad 1 win (victories deemed most impressive by the NCAA) all the way to Selection Sunday.
For Kentucky’s home win over Indiana to qualify as a Quad 1 victory, the Hoosiers will have to be in the top 30 of the NET. Through Sunday, IU stood at No. 32.
As things presently stand, UK is 1-4 in Quad 1 contests.
The SEC that Kentucky will play in this winter looks to be a solid league, albeit far off the glory of 2024-25 when the Southeastern Conference might have been the strongest men’s basketball league in NCAA history.
Aside from UK, six other Southeastern Conference teams entered Monday ranked in the top 30 of the NET Rankings. Of those, only Vanderbilt (12-0), at No. 6, was in the Top 10.
Kentucky will play three of the SEC teams ranked highest in the NET — No. 21 Florida, No. 26 Tennessee and Vandy — both at home and away.
Overall, the Wildcats will have 11 chances at a Quad 1 victory in SEC regular-season play based on the NET Rankings as they stood Monday morning.
A season ago, North Carolina was chosen for the NCAA Tournament field with a mark of 1-12 in Quad 1 games.
Sometimes, teams with the basketball brand power of UNC — or UK — derive a benefit of the doubt from the NCAA tourney selection committee that is so broad that it would not fit it in the Grand Canyon.
After Kentucky’s win over St. John’s last Saturday, Pitino, the former UK head man, chided the commonwealth’s sportswriters for having been too critical of Pope, tri-captain of Pitino’s 1996 NCAA title team at Kentucky, during the Wildcats early-season struggles.
Noting that UK had played without Quaintance and with Lowe’s availability limited, Pitino said “I think you all need to learn a little bit of the lesson as writers, because you’re expecting Kentucky to be this great basketball team with all those injuries. So you all need to learn the lesson, because you can’t be a great basketball team without two of the best players, with no point guard, no big man.”
With all respect to Ricky P. for standing up for one of his guys, the early-season analysis of the current UK men’s hoops season actually holds up quite well.
1.) Kentucky signed Quaintance knowing he was recovering from ACL surgery and would not be available during the early season. You can’t use as an excuse for early-season defeats the absence of a player you acquired knowing he would not play early in the season.
2.) Questioning why Pope constructed a roster without a second true point guard to step in for Lowe in case of injury hardly seems outrageous.
3.) Even with Lowe and Quaintance on the court, it is still not clear Kentucky has enough offensive skill and shot-making capacity spread across its overall roster to mount the kind of March Madness charge Wildcats backers yearn to see.
What we do know, as UK prepares to finish its nonconference slate Tuesday afternoon against intrastate foe Bellarmine, is that the Wildcats appear to be in surprisingly good shape in the power rankings even after their early season wobbles.
For Kentucky backers, that should make for some holly, jolly holidays.
