National experts give us their predictions on how Pope’s first season at Kentucky will end

For the second year in a row — but for much different reasons — Kentucky will be one of the most intriguing teams in all of college basketball going into the new season.

Last year, the Wildcats were stacked with five-star freshmen, John Calipari choosing a contrarian approach to winning as the rest of the sport relied on more experienced players.

This year, it’s a completely reshaped roster once again — 12 new scholarship players — but that’s because Calipari’s abrupt April exit for Arkansas led to a coaching change, and new Kentucky leader Mark Pope had to build his first UK team from scratch. Even in the roster-shuffling age of the transfer portal, Pope’s all-new group is an outlier.

In both cases — Calipari’s final Kentucky team and Pope’s first — the college basketball world at large is eagerly awaiting the results.

Last year, the Herald-Leader asked experts from around the country for their preseason predictions on how Kentucky’s campaign would go. Since the NCAA Tournament can be such a crapshoot, we asked analysts to project how the Cats would do in the regular season.

Calipari’s final team ended up doing a little better than our experts anticipated — earning a 3 seed in March Madness — but the result there obviously fell well short of expectations, and the first-round loss to Oakland indirectly led to Calipari’s departure after 15 seasons in charge

Our question was worded basically the same way this time around, with experts given several choices for what Pope’s team will look like on Selection Sunday — from a 1 seed to out of the NCAA Tournament altogether.

Here’s what they had to say about Kentucky’s 2024-25 season.

UK will make the NCAA Tournament

Of all the college basketball analysts who weighed in on the Wildcats, none have them missing the NCAA Tournament, a scenario that seemed plausible after Calipari’s exit left the program with zero players. (And it’s still not out of the realm of possibility given the difficult nature of UK’s schedule and these players’ lack of experience playing as one unit.)

Even the most cautious of our experts projected the Cats to make the March Madness field in Pope’s first season.

“I’m fully expecting Kentucky to be in the 2025 NCAA Tournament, but the Kentucky that we see in February and March is going to be vastly different than the team we see in November and December,” CBS Sports insider Jon Rothstein said.

“The Wildcats have a brand-new roster that has never played together before, and they have a brand-new coach in Mark Pope. The SEC is also headed for a massive year and could challenge for double-digit bids.

“With all that said, anything less than a trip to March Madness would be a massive surprise in Lexington.”