Kentucky Basketball Against The Big East

Photo by Grant Halverson/NCAA Photos via Getty Images

Greetings, BBN!

In this article, we are diving into the Kentucky Wildcats’ record against every Big East team, both in regular season and NCAA Tournament play.

Compared to against the Big Ten, Big 12, and ACC, the Cats, in their history, have not fared well playing these 11 teams in NCAA Tournament play.

Against UConn and Marquette, they’ve faced off many times in March, only to be bounced from the bracket into the long offseason 40 minutes later.

Several other schools they’ve never met in the Big Dance,

including Xavier, even though they’ve played them 39 times in regular season play and beaten them in 37 of those contests. Let’s take a look at UK vs the Big East:

Kentucky Basketball vs. The Big East

Notes:

• UK is 9-13 in NCAA Tournament play against Big East teams, largely thanks to UConn, Marquette, and St. John’s. Against those three in the Big Dance UK has gone 5-11 and lost in the 2011 Final Four and 2014 title game to UConn.
• The Kentucky-Xavier series is extremely peculiar. Between 1935 and 1968, the Cats and Musketeers played 39 times, sometimes twice a season, and in those games, Kentucky pretty much just added automatic L’s to Xavier’s record every winter. They were on a 25-game winning streak before the series finally got cut in 1968 after a 115-77 Kentucky blowout. I imagine the series probably got cut because Xavier was like, “we can’t take this anymore—why are we doing this to ourselves?” And they’ve never played since!
• Kentucky has never beaten Georgetown—in regular or postseason play. With the way the program’s been performing of late, they’ve been missing a lot of opportunities to fix that.
• In 2023 UK beat Providence in the Round of 64 for their first NCAA Tournament win since 2019. That team earned a 6-seed and was facing the 11-seeded Friars in Greensboro on a Friday evening tip.
• UK’s only win over UConn in program history came in 2009 in the SEC/Big East Invitational in Madison Square Garden. It was Calipari’s first season and they only won 64-61 thanks to some late John Wall heroics. His three-point play with 30.8 seconds left sealed the deal and set up UConn’s big revenge tour in 2011 and 2014.

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