Kentucky baseball doesn't get the benefit of the doubt in preseason polls
Despite back-to-back seasons of overachieving, Kentucky did not land in preseason Top 25 polls by D1baseball.com or Perfect Game.
With the college baseball season just about a month away, preseason polls by some of the leading voices in the sport have been filed. Despite winning a share of the SEC regular season in 2024, reaching the College World Series for the first time in program history and posting a school record 46 wins, Kentucky was not ranked by D1baseball.com or Perfect Game to open the 2025 season.
This serves as a reminder that the Wildcats are not the kind of program that enjoys the benefit of the doubt in college baseball.
Historically one of the worst programs in the SEC, Kentucky is a newcomer on the national scene. While there were pockets of success under previous head coaches, the Wildcats had never won an NCAA regional until Nick Mingione’s first season in 2017. After a lull in the following years, the Wildcats began to turn the corner in May 2022 and have since been one of the stronger programs in the entire conference. Though it missed the tournament in 2022, Kentucky produced 13 wins against RPI top 25 teams and followed that up by building an NCAA Tournament team — mostly through the transfer portal — in 2023.
Though it won the Lexington Regional in 2023 and lost to eventual national champion LSU in the Supers, Kentucky was not ranked to begin 2024 by the major publications and was picked to finish fifth in the SEC East in the SEC Baseball Preseason Coaches Poll. Kentucky, of course, outpaced those expectations easily and produced the best team in program history.
I did not speak to anyone at D1baseball or Perfect Game about their preseason picks. In fairness to Perfect Game, it posted a graphic on Monday that shows Kentucky just outside of the top 25 at No. 28.
However, I imagine two main factors left Kentucky out of the polls: