BIRMINGHAM, Ala. — For so long in SEC men’s basketball, it’s been Kentucky and the rest of the field. And no one was taking the field.
The Wildcats were picked first in the league’s preseason media poll every season since coach John Calipari took over in the 2009-10 season with the exception of two. In 2010-11, Florida was picked to win the East Division over UK, and in 2020-21, Tennessee was picked first and UK second.
Well, the pack has officially caught up to the Cats.
Kentucky was picked fourth in the league’s latest media preseason poll, its lowest showing since being picked third in the East before the 2008-09 season. Tennessee was voted the preseason favorite, with Texas A&M and Arkansas behind them.
To put it in perspective, the media poll began in 1989-90 and UK has only been picked lower than second — overall or in the East Division — four times before this season.
Calipari likes to say administrations win championships.
“What’s happened here, all these schools have invested,” Calipari said at SEC Media Days on Wednesday. “…They’ve invested in arenas, coaches’ salaries, recruiting, all the stuff that you need to be good.”
Good enough for Alabama to win the league last season after being picked fifth in the preseason. Good enough for both the Crimson Tide and Arkansas to have players taken in June’s NBA draft before UK heard its name called. Good enough that South Carolina, Georgia and Vanderbilt are the only league teams that haven’t made the NCAA Tournament over the past five seasons.
The hard pivot began in 2016 when the SEC hired former Big East Commissioner Mike Tranghese as a consultant for basketball. The league then added essentially a basketball commissioner to concentrate solely on ways to improve their programs.
They improved nonconference schedules to better place teams for NCAA selection — and just had another season with eight teams getting bids, which tied the league record set in 2018.
“Kentucky has and will lead the way in men’s basketball in the SEC, that’s never going to change,” Auburn coach Bruce Pearl said. “But what has changed is there have just been more programs that invested and taken it more seriously.”
The SEC led all conferences with five teams ranked when the Associated Press Top 25 preseason poll was released this week. That included No. 24 Alabama, which won its second SEC Tournament title in the last three years last season.
The rise of the rest of the pack in the SEC almost puts the Cats in the rare position of being a bit overlooked. UK can never quite be considered underdogs, although senior guard Antonio Reeves suggested as much.
“Of course, we want to be at the top,” Reeves said. “It’s always good to be an underdog as well because we can show people how good we are.”
It may turn out to be a good thing for UK.
Calipari has a young team with a freshman class of eight that will play with a collective chip on its shoulder. That’s despite the fact that they have perhaps four players (Justin Edwards, Aaron Bradshaw, D.J. Wagner and Zvonimir Ivisic) who could go in the first round of the next NBA draft.
UK graduate forward Tre Mitchell, who played at Massachusetts, Texas and West Virginia before joining UK this summer after coach Bob Huggins resigned, said he’s already seen a difference with how the freshman class approaches practice.
“Now you have people saying that the young guys can’t get it done, and that alone is pushing these dudes to go above and beyond every single day,” Mitchell said.
That’s not the kind of motivation Kentucky is used to needing, but it could help as the Cats try to show the rest of the league they’re still the leader of the pack.
The polls:Kentucky basketball to begin season with lowest preseason ranking of John Calipari era
Reach sports columnist C.L. Brown at [email protected], follow him on X at @CLBrownHoops and subscribe to his newsletter atprofile.courier-journal.com/newsletters/cl-browns-latest to make sure you never miss one of his columns.