Through Oct. 31, Sports Illustrated will count down its preseason college basketball Top 25 with overviews of each team. Here are the full rankings so far.
It’d be hard to call Mark Pope’s first season in Lexington, Ky., anything but a smashing success. He inherited no returning scholarship players in early April when he took the job and found a way to put together a team that got Kentucky back to the second weekend of the NCAA tournament for the first time since 2019. Pope’s offensive system is among the sharpest in the country, and Kentucky fans have every reason to be excited about how it might look with a more talented and deeper roster in ’25–26.
