Kentucky basketball will begin the season at No. 23 in the Associated Press Top 25, landing in a spot that is familiar for the wrong reasons and still well below the program’s usual standard.
The ranking matches UK’s lowest preseason position since the Wildcats were left out of the poll in 2008, the final year of Billy Gillispie’s run. It also mirrors the preseason slot Kentucky held two years ago, right before Mark Pope’s first season on the sideline.
Even so, the No. 23 placement is still a step up from where the Wildcats spent most of last season. Kentucky was unranked in 15 of the final 16 AP polls, with the lone exception coming at No. 25 in Week 15. The preseason nod gives the program its highest ranking since Week 5 of last season.
Pope’s group has already taken its first step into exhibition play, beating Little Rock 69-49 last Friday. The next test comes Friday, when Kentucky faces No. 19 Texas Tech in another exhibition game.
That matchup is only the beginning of a long stretch of ranked opponents on the regular-season schedule. Kentucky will see No.
1 Florida, No. 7 Texas, No.
8 Tennessee, No. 9 Virginia, No.
11 Louisville, No. 12 Arkansas, No.
17 Kansas, No. 20 Alabama and No.
24 Vanderbilt during the year.
At SEC Media Days last week, Pope made it clear the outside numbers don’t occupy much space inside Kentucky’s building. After the Wildcats were picked seventh in the league by reporters, he said, “To be honest, we don’t spend a lot of time on polls,” Pope said at SEC Media Days last week after his team was picked to finish seventh in the league by reporters. “We spend all our time on the work that we do, the wins that we earned.
“We are very, very focused on the only opinion mattering is the opinion in our locker room. That’s really important for all teams in all sports.
It’s really, really important for our team at Kentucky, for us to become what we can become. The polls will change.
They change every week.”
Pope also pointed to Kentucky’s football team as an example of why preseason rankings don’t mean much once the games start.
“They dropped them out of the Top 25 after they went on the road and beat an SEC team on the road,” Pope said. “The guys came back and proved it because the polls didn’t matter to them either. Had another epic win against our counterparts at LSU.”
Kentucky is also slotted at No. 23 in the preseason coaches poll, which came out Monday.
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Inside the locker room afterward, the celebration matched the score and the background noise around it. Kentucky players swung a belt on Oklahomas mascot and held up a screenshot tied to the restroom incident, while social media filled with clips and posts from both sides adding to the banter. For a team that walked into Norman with a grudge, the win provided the kind of response that tends to travel well after the final whistle. [Read more 🡒]
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