Report: Kentucky, Arkansas to play once at Rupp Arena in regular season

Former Kentucky head coach John Calipari’s move to Arkansas this offseason set the stage for a heated matchup between the two teams in SEC play next winter, and they will reportedly face off just once in the 2024-25 regular season.

According to college hoops insider Jon Rothstein, the ‘Cats and Hogs will only play one time in 2024-25 with that game occurring in Rupp Arena, a homecoming for Calipari. Here was his report of that news, tweeted out on Monday afternoon:

“Sources: Kentucky and Arkansas will only play once during the 2024-25 season and the game will be played in Lexington at Rupp Arena. Date is currently TBD.”

Arkansas and Kentucky also faced off just once this past season, with the Wildcats traveling down to Fayetteville, where they came away victorious. Since that was the only meeting in the regular season in SEC Play, the series heads back to Lexington for its next installment. And with only one game between them expected, Kentucky will host the only game between Calipari’s new program and the one he just left.

In the larger scheduling picture, conference foes facing off two times per regular season will become more rare going forward. The SEC currently has an 18-game conference slate, and with new teams coming over from the Big 12, the league just grew to 16 teams.

In the former 14-team model, each team played the 13 other conference foes plus five of them twice to get to the 18 games. However, with 16 teams in the league, each club will play the other 15 and then just three of those opponents twice.

Also, as part of the new scheduling model, the SEC has said that of those three opponents each team plays twice, two will be permanent with home-and-home series each season, while the other team will rotate on a yearly basis. So, another newsworthy piece of information relayed by Rothstein is that Kentucky and Arkansas do not appear to be slated as annual rivals who play twice every season, since they will reportedly play just once in 2024.

However, there’s certainly the possibility that the SEC will provide a standalone homecoming game for Calipari at Kentucky this season with Arkansas before setting the two programs up to play twice, home and away, in the 2025-26 regular season.

As of now, there’s no word yet on which teams Kentucky and Arkansas will face twice on a permanent basis, other than the fact that this news suggests they won’t face each other in annual home-and-home’s.