Rowland: Kentucky and college basketball predictions for the 2025-26 season

The college basketball season is here. Both of Kentucky’s exhibition games are in the books with the Wildcats winning one and losing the other.

This week the regular season begins. Kentucky starts with Nicholls on Tuesday night in Rupp Arena but it’s sure to be a long season with ebbs and flows for almost every team.

The SEC is coming off arguably the best season of all-time for a conference. What’s next for an encore?

Here are a number of season predictions from Cats Illustrated publisher Justin Rowland.

It’s more the Lowe & Oweh show than the sum of all its parts

This is an early conviction that I’ll come off if it proves to be wrong. But when I look at the team on paper and then watch them in action what stands out to me isn’t so much the depth but the potential stardom in the starting backcourt between Jaland Lowe. I think Lowe and Otega Oweh have a chance to be the kind of backcourt that takes over games even against some good teams. But we don’t know exactly how Lowe will be acclimated to Mark Pope’s system. Surely the return of Jayden Quaintance and the development of the complementary parts around the backcourt are intriguing but if this team is going to be elite they need Lowe and Oweh to play at an extremely high level. The good news is that seems realistic.

Kentucky’s defense will be much improved

I don’t know if I’m ready to predict it will be a top-10 defensive team just because of how much effort and energy the Wildcats expend on the offensive end and the pace that Kentucky is likely to play at. Then there’s the fact that you would expect Pope to lean on some offense-heavy lineups at times. But I do think it’s very fair to expect the defense to improve substantially. For starters, there’s more built-in depth to sustain injuries and absences that could occur during the season. It’s hard to see this roster finding itself in the position it did at point guard on both ends of the court last season. When Quaintance returns it’s possible they become a top-10 defensive team.

Shooting will regress but won’t sink the team

For all the talk about how many threes Kentucky will hit after last year, I’m just not sure they will knock down as many. Last year UK shot 37.5% from three-point range as a team and that ranked in the top-25 of all teams in the country. They were 40th in made threes per game. It was a huge part of what they did. Because there is no Koby Brea and two of the team’s better shooters are Kam Williams and Trent Noah, who will be in mostly complementary roles this year, the numbers should tick down some. But there are enough capable shooters in a good offense that it’s hard to imagine shooting being a negative theme we talk about this year.

We will underestimate the impact of last year’s experience

Perhaps the single-most defining feature of Mark Pope’s first team at Kentucky was tremendous experience. It was probably the most experienced Kentucky basketball team of all time and it was more experienced than almost any team in the nation last year. While the squad was new to Pope’s system, that kind of experience and seniority led to emotional maturity and a polished brand of basketball that helped the offense thrive and sustain solid performance for most of the year. This year’s team is a far cry from the kind of youthful team John Calipari had but this team is much less experienced and veteran-laden as last year’s team.

Going with Houston at No. 1

The Cougars have been knocking on the door under Kelvin Sampson for a while now. They’re a proven commodity in the current landscape of college basketball and almost everyone has Houston as one of the three best teams going into the country. Given the scale of turnover everywhere now I’ll go with what I trust over what I don’t know, and I trust that Houston is going to be a very high seed and battle tested when they get into March. They should again be the nation’s best defensive team and have enough offense to get it done. However, I would contest the idea that this year is about Houston, Purdue, and Florida far ahead of the rest of the field. Kentucky, Duke, UConn, Michigan, St. John’s, and some others appear to be fairly close.

How many teams will the SEC get in the Big Dance?

What does the SEC have in store for an encore one year after placing a record 14 teams in the 2025 NCAA Tournament? Not only that, but the SEC took home the hardware with Florida winning its third national championship and first under Todd Golden.

It will be hard for the SEC to match last year’s record when the domination started in the non-conference schedule and continued through the season, culminating in a strong tournament showing that didn’t take away from what the league did in the regular season.

I’ll predict the following teams make the Big Dance out of the SEC this season: Florida, Kentucky, Arkansas, Tennessee, Alabama, Missouri, Ole Miss, Mississippi State, Auburn, and Texas. That would be another fantastic showing for the league even if its three teams off last year’s pace. Georgia, Oklahoma, Vanderbilt, and others are worth watching as well.

It wouldn’t surprise me if the SEC is the nation’s top conference again but I’ll call for the domination to be a little less than last year.

Big picture thoughts on Kentucky

Mark Pope built this team with last year in mind. He has one year’s worth experience coaching in the Southeastern Conference. Year 1 was about building a roster that would make for an easy landing as Pope put his stamp on the program. So you saw a lot of guys who could come in and easily execute a good system because of their experience. This year, you saw Pope target some guys that would presumably thrive or improve in his system but he also focused on increasing the team’s length and athleticism, two areas where it was never lacking under John Calipari. The question is how well those tweaks will move Kentucky toward getting to a championship level.

The depth is good enough to compete at the highest level and the backcourt is, too. The question is whether the frontcourt will be at an elite level or good enough as Quaintance is coming back and then after he comes back the question will probably still be whether the frontcourt is good enough.

Pope’s substitution patterns and decisions on how to mold the roster over the season are a variable but based on what we saw last year he’s probably going to run a pretty deep bench well into the season.

I think Kentucky is among a dozen or so teams that are the most interesting in college basketball and while I would not have the Wildcats in the top three, I could see them in the top-5 as a legitimate Final Four contender.

I’ve got Kentucky going 11-2 in the non-conference before SEC play starts up and then going 12-6 against a very strong conference. Give them a couple of wins in the SEC Tournament and that would place Kentucky at 25-9 with a lot of high quality wins. That’s probably a strong three seed and possibly a two. I could see this team as a 1 seed in some circumstances but they play a lot of games against strong competition so I think there will be some losses. But they will be one of the trendy picks to at least advance to the Elite Eight on Selection Sunday.