This is the final season of SEC basketball as we know it. How will it work in the future?
The Southeastern Conference men’s basketball schedule tips off this weekend, the much-anticipated league slate finally here in what is shaping up as a highly competitive two months on the court.
And once those final regular-season SEC games are played on March 9, the league will never look exactly the same again.
Starting with the 2024-25 season, the westward expansion of the SEC will continue with the addition of Oklahoma and Texas into the conference, which will grow to 16 teams. The increased numbers present a new set of scheduling challenges for a conference that will see its third expansion in the last 33 years, and this will change how Kentucky’s league slate looks moving forward.
Currently, SEC basketball teams play 18 conference games. That schedule features three “permanent” opponents — in Kentucky’s case, those are Florida, Tennessee and Vanderbilt — that are played on a home-and-home basis each season, for a total of six games.
Each team then has two additional home-and-home series each season against opponents that rotate from year to year, adding another four games to the schedule. (This year, Kentucky will play Arkansas and Mississippi State twice.)
That leaves eight league rivals unaccounted for, and each team plays each of those schools once — four home games and four road trips — to get to a total of 18 conference matchups.
Obviously, with the league ballooning to 16 teams, that structure will have to be tweaked.
An SEC spokesperson confirmed to the Herald-Leader that, starting with the 2024-25 season, the new league schedule will look like this:
▪ Each team has two permanent opponents that they will place twice per season, home and away, for a total of four games.
▪ Each team has a third opponent that will also be played home and away. This opponent will rotate from season to season.
▪ That will leave 12 league rivals unaccounted for, and each team will have one matchup — six home games and six road trips, for a total of 12 games — against those teams.
▪ The SEC schedule will remain at 18 games under this format.
It won’t be a drastic change to the SEC basketball calendar, but it will mean a different look for Kentucky and the rest of the league. The biggest departure from the past is obviously the dropping of one “permanent” opponent.
A league spokesperson told the Herald-Leader that the new permanent opponents for each league team have not yet been decided and there is no specific date for those matchups to be revealed.
The SEC has unveiled its full conference schedule during the first week of September in recent years, so it’s a safe bet that we’ll know each team’s permanent opponents by that time. That specific announcement could also come before the 2024-25 schedule release.
Until then, here’s a look at Kentucky’s most likely league rivals moving forward.
Kentucky vs. Tennessee
This should be a no-brainer.
The Wildcats have played Tennessee more than any other opponent — 237 times, to be exact — in a series that first started in 1910. The two border rivals have faced each other twice in all but three regular seasons over the past 100 years, and there’s no reason to press the pause button on that annual tradition. Especially now.
This series has been amazingly competitive over the past decade or so. In the past 22 games played between Kentucky and Tennessee — dating back to the 2012-13 season — the Wildcats have won 11, and the Volunteers have won 11. That includes three meetings in the SEC Tournament — Tennessee won two of those, though UK beat the Vols in the SEC title game in 2018 — and neither side has won more than two games in a row over the other in the past 10 years.
Kentucky’s regular-season sweep of the Vols last year — including a 63-56 surprise win in Knoxville — marked the first time the series wasn’t split since 2018, when Tennessee swept the Cats before UK turned the tables in that SEC Tournament title game.
And 2024 is looking like another great year for the rivalry. In the first AP Top 25 poll of the new year released this week, Tennessee was No. 5 and Kentucky was No. 6 — the only two SEC teams positioned in the top 20 nationally. The Cats will host the Vols on Feb. 3 before playing in Knoxville on March 9, the final game of the regular season.
This is arguably the best rivalry in the SEC at the moment. And it should continue.
UK’s second SEC opponent
If Tennessee is a slam dunk to end up as one of UK’s permanent opponents, the second program on that list is a bit less clear. There are a few different ways that SEC decision-makers could go with this one, depending on what they want out of the future of the league schedule.
Here’s a stab at a top three, in order of likelihood:
3. Arkansas: The Razorbacks have only been in the SEC since 1991, but the UK-Arkansas rivalry was ignited from the very start — the Hogs trouncing No. 8 Kentucky by 17 points in the first league meeting — and has supplied plenty of highlights over the past three decades, including four meetings in the SEC Tournament title game (all of those won by the Cats).
Arkansas has been one of the league’s most consistent programs in recent years under head coach Eric Musselman, and Bud Walton Arena is electric whenever John Calipari and the Wildcats come to town. This is always a fun matchup, and if the league wants to add more spice to the top of the schedule, this would make sense. It would surely be well-received by general basketball fans, but it wouldn’t be exactly fair to the Cats, who would be stuck with two of the league’s other powers on a permanent basis.
This would be entertaining, but it’s not likely, especially with both sides having more logical geographic matchups as options.
2. Florida: Currently one of Kentucky’s three permanent SEC opponents, Florida has played UK twice in every single regular season for the past 60 years, the longest such streak for the Wildcats.
As the Southeastern Conference’s most southeastern team, the Gators aren’t an obvious geographic fit for anyone in the league. Auburn, at more than 300 miles away, is actually the closest SEC campus to Gainesville, though the Tigers aren’t one of Florida’s current permanent opponents. (Those are UK, Vanderbilt and border rival Georgia.)
While the overall series is lopsided — Kentucky is 109-41 all time against the Gators — this has been one of the league’s hottest rivalries at various points over the SEC’s history. From a competition standpoint, it made a lot of sense to pair UK and UF when the league adopted its current scheduling format before the 2015-16 season. That was also the first year of the post-Billy Donovan era in Gainesville, however, and things have grown stale since his departure.
Going into Saturday’s SEC opener, Kentucky has won nine of the past 10 games in this rivalry — the only loss coming during the Cats’ dreadful 9-16 season amid the COVID-19 pandemic.
This could very well be the final year of UK vs. Florida as an annual two-game series.
1. Vanderbilt: In this case, the most likely outcome is probably going to be the most obvious.
If Kentucky will have only two permanent SEC opponents, Tennessee and Vanderbilt make the most sense.
UK and Vandy have played each other 204 times — second in number only to the Cats-Vols rivalry. Nashville (at about 210 miles away) is second to Knoxville in proximity to Lexington, which isn’t particularly close to any other SEC city. (Athens is actually next at about 400 miles.)
While this rivalry has had its moments, the recent history has been lopsided. UK won 14 straight games over the Commodores until Vandy upset the Cats in Rupp Arena last year before defeating UK again nine days later in the SEC Tournament. But, with Tennessee the most logical choice to be the Cats’ other permanent opponent, the Dores would be a counterbalance to Kentucky’s annual schedule.
In this little pocket of the SEC, it just makes sense to match up these three geographically similar programs with each other, with Kentucky playing its two border rivals in a home-and-home series every year and Tennessee and Vandy doing the same.
Is that what the league’s powers that be will decide to do? We’ll have to wait for the official word.
Current SEC permanent opponents
The SEC’s new permanent opponents will be announced later this year. These are the current permanent opponents for each league team, adopted before the 2015-16 season:
Alabama: Auburn, LSU, Mississippi State.
Arkansas: LSU, Missouri, Texas A&M.
Auburn: Alabama, Georgia, Ole Miss.
Florida: Georgia, Kentucky, Vanderbilt.
Georgia: Auburn, Florida, South Carolina.
Kentucky: Florida, Tennessee, Vanderbilt.
LSU: Alabama, Arkansas, Texas A&M.
Ole Miss: Auburn, Mississippi State, Missouri.
Mississippi State: Alabama, Ole Miss, South Carolina.
Missouri: Arkansas, Ole Miss, Texas A&M.
South Carolina: Georgia, Mississippi State, Tennessee.
Tennessee: Kentucky, South Carolina, Vanderbilt.
Texas A&M: Arkansas, LSU, Missouri.
Vanderbilt: Florida, Kentucky, Tennessee.
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