National college basketball writers are buying into the Kentucky Wildcats hype, and some believe this is the year the Wildcats cut down the nets.
Across the country, outlets like The Athletic, CBS Sports, Yahoo, and ESPN released their preseason predictions, and Kentucky showed up on nearly every Final Four list.
Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Eisenberg picked Kentucky to make the Final Four, along with Duke, Florida, and Houston, while picking the Cougars to win it all.
ESPN’s Myron Medcalf was the lone panelist
from the network to include Kentucky in his Final Four and also picked them to win the SEC and named Mark Pope his National Coach of the Year.
Three of The Athletic’s 10 analysts picked the Wildcats to reach Indianapolis, with Tobias Bass going a step further by predicting Kentucky to win the national championship.
At CBS Sports, half of its six-person panel had Kentucky in the Final Four. Isaac Trotter crowned the Cats as national champions, while Cameron Salerno projected them to finish as the national runner-up, and David Cobb had Kentucky losing in the Final Four.
With returning star Otega Oweh, standout freshmen Jasper Johnson and Malachi Moreno, and high-impact transfers like Mouhamed Dioubate and Jayden Quaintance, the Wildcats look deeper and more complete than last season. The national media believes they have all the pieces and the pressure to prove it.
