Happy New Year, college basketball. Here’s what we can’t wait to see from you in 2024.

The calendar has flipped to 2024, and a special year of basketball could be on the horizon for the Kentucky Wildcats.

UK enters SEC play this weekend with a 10-2 record and a No. 6 ranking in the Associated Press Top 25, the first time the Cats have been slotted that high in the first poll of the new year since 2017, when they just barely missed out on a trip to the Final Four, somewhere they haven’t been since two seasons before that.

Can John Calipari and Kentucky return to college basketball’s biggest stage for the first time in nine years? That’ll obviously be the biggest thing on UK fans’ watch list over the next three months.

But there will be plenty of other storylines to follow as the 2023-24 season continues to unfold. Here’s a look at 10 things to keep an eye on — all of them tangentially related to Kentucky — in the new year.

Can Kenny Payne turn it around?

A couple of weeks ago, it looked like a long shot that Kenny Payne would be Louisville’s coach at the start of the new year. Only a season and a half into his tenure as the leader of his alma mater, Payne — the longtime UK assistant — has amassed a 9-35 record with several embarrassing losses. Attendance at the once-rocking Yum Center is way down, and many in the fan base have turned on the former Cardinals star.

U of L athletics director Josh Heird said the morning after the Cards’ 95-76 loss to Kentucky — in a “home” game that was half-filled with blue shirts — that Payne was safe heading into January, but how long can he really last? To keep his job, Payne probably needs to not only win games but win back the fans. The odds remain stacked against him.

Just how bad could it get for Louisville? The Cards have 19 games remaining on their schedule — all of them against ACC competition — and the KenPom projections have them winning just one of those matchups: a home date with Notre Dame on Feb. 21. The clock is ticking.

Can Mark Pope make a run?

Like a high-octane, highly efficient offensive team that scores points in bunches and loves the long ball? No, it’s not Kentucky. We’re talking about the BYU Cougars, led by former UK player Mark Pope.

Now in his fifth season as BYU’s head coach, Pope is in charge of one of America’s most watchable college basketball teams. And the Cougars might just be one of the country’s best squads this year. Their Top 25 ranking to start 2024 is good enough — BYU is 12th in the latest AP poll — but the computers like them even more. KenPom has Pope’s team at No. 3 nationally, the Torvik ratings place them at No. 5, and the NCAA’s NET ratings — an important sorting tool for Selection Sunday — has the Cougars at No. 2 in the country, behind only undefeated Houston.

BYU hasn’t advanced past the first round of the NCAA Tournament since 2011 and hasn’t made it beyond the first weekend of March Madness in more than four decades. That could change this season.

John Calipari is in his 15th season at Kentucky and will turn 65 years old next month. The “Who will be the next head coach at UK?” question is a perennial curiosity up for discussion — no matter the current state of the program — and it’s relatively rare that a former Wildcats player is seriously near the top of that list. If Pope can break through — and maintain BYU’s success with its move to the Big 12 this season — might the 51-year-old ex-Cat become a realistic option down the road?

Rick Pitino’s final act?

Speaking of Kentucky coaches, one of the best in the program’s history is back in big-time college basketball for the first time since his unceremonious ouster from Louisville on the eve of the 2017-18 season.

Rick Pitino, at age 71, has St. John’s — a once-proud program that hasn’t won an NCAA Tournament game in 24 years — in the March Madness discussion in his first season on the job. We all know Pitino can coach, but does he have the talent to get the Red Storm into the Big Dance in year one? And can the New York native get the players to return St. John’s to national relevancy during what appears to be the final stop of his Hall of Fame career? The first question should be answered in the next month or so, with the Johnnies set for a brutal stretch of Big East games that will tell us a lot about how good they really are in Pitino’s first season.

A competitive SEC

Kentucky is very clearly a contender — and perhaps the team to beat — in the SEC this season, with conference play tipping off this weekend. Who will be the Cats’ top competition?

The rankings say it’s Tennessee, the preseason favorite to win the league and the SEC’s top-rated team in the latest AP poll at No. 5 nationally, one spot ahead of UK. The computers like Alabama best, with KenPom rating the Tide at No. 5 nationally and the Torvik ratings putting them third in the country.

But this is probably going to take a while to sort out. There are four SEC teams ranked in the latest AP poll (No. 5 Tennessee, No. 6 Kentucky, No. 22 Ole Miss and No. 25 Auburn) but four others (Texas A&M, South Carolina, Mississippi State and Alabama) got votes this week, and Arkansas and Florida loom as potential threats.

The most recent ESPN Bracketology projections place a whopping nine SEC teams in the NCAA Tournament field. And KenPom, which rates the league second in the country behind only the Big 12, has seven SEC teams in the top 35 nationally and only one (Vanderbilt) rated lower than No. 102.

No easy games in the conference this season.

Ex-Cats in Seattle

There are enough former UK scholarship players still playing college basketball to field an entire roster — 10 of them, in fact. Two former Kentucky teammates have reunited elsewhere, and they’re leading an improbable charge for a program that’s been down on its luck in recent years.

Keion Brooks Jr. and Sahvir Wheeler, both starters on UK’s ill-fated 2021-22 team, are now in their final season of college at Washington, which began the week with a top-50 KenPom rating after missing the postseason altogether in each of the past four years.

Brooks is second in the Pac-12 with 20.5 points per game, Wheeler tops the league with 7.0 assists per game, and Washington already has a victory over Gonzaga on its resume, with the NCAA Tournament — an improbable thought two months ago — looking like a real possibility.

The only March Madness game either of these two players has ever appeared in? Kentucky’s shocking loss to Saint Peter’s two years ago.

Is this Purdue’s year?

For the second college basketball season in a row, the sport’s reigning national player of the year decided to return to school for another go. Last season, it was Oscar Tshiebwe, who came back to Kentucky and filled folks around here with hopes of a possible national title run. Those dreams were obviously dashed, with the Cats limping through the season — looking at one point like they might miss the NCAA Tournament altogether — before rallying toward the end for a 6 seed and an eventual second-round exit. Tshiebwe battled injury and inconsistencies, ultimately earning second-team All-America honors before heading off to the NBA.

Zach Edey has been a different story. Can he finally lead Purdue to the promised land?

The 7-foot-4 center enters the new year as the odds-on favorite to repeat as consensus national player of the year — something that hasn’t happened since Ralph Sampson did it in 1983 — and the Boilermakers are ranked No. 1 in the country and eyeing a trip to the Final Four, a place they haven’t been in 44 years.

For all of Matt Painter’s success as Purdue’s head coach, March Madness disappointment has been a constant, and the Boilermakers’ past three seasons have ended with losses to a 16 seed, a 15 seed and a 13 seed. Will 2024 be the year Purdue finally gets it done?

Best of the blue bloods

The debate over who should be considered a college basketball “blue blood” will rage on until the end of time, but there are four programs that we can all surely agree belong on that list: Duke, Kansas, Kentucky and North Carolina.

All four of those teams have been ranked in the top 10 at various points of this season, and all but one of them — No. 14 Duke — will start the new year in that range. It wouldn’t be a stretch to see any of these blue bloods in the Final Four three months from now.

Kentucky needs to get there the most. The Wildcats haven’t made it back to the sport’s final week since their perfect season ended with a loss to Wisconsin in the 2015 Final Four, and Big Blue Nation has had to sit and watch all three of their most accomplished rivals cut down the nets over that time. Duke beat Wisconsin for the 2015 title two days after the Badgers ousted UK, then North Carolina won the NCAA championship in 2017, and Kansas did the same in 2022.

To add to the angst, UNC beat UK in the 2017 Elite Eight on its way to that year’s title, and all three of the Wildcats’ fellow blue bloods appeared in the 2022 Final Four, which was played a couple of weeks after Saint Peter’s handed Kentucky one of its worst losses in program history.

Who will be the last blue blood playing in the 2024 NCAA Tournament? At this point, it could be any of them.

Penny and Memphis

When Memphis legend Penny Hardaway was named head coach of the Tigers in 2018 — and then promptly delivered the nation’s No. 1 recruiting class to his alma mater in 2019 — the college basketball world was bracing for a new powerhouse program.

In his five full seasons on the job, Hardaway has won one NCAA Tournament game, his tenure highlighted more by what-ifs than on-court results. Now in season six, Penny finds his Tigers ranked No. 15 in the first AP poll of the new year, with four wins already against teams that were in the Top 25 at the time Memphis played them. And he’s getting it done not with stud recruits but with college basketball journeymen.

Memphis’ top seven players — in terms of playing time — are all in at least their fourth season of college, and the Tigers’ top four scorers are all playing for their third different school at the NCAA level. The team’s top player, 22-year-old small forward David Jones, was the No. 144 recruit in the 247Sports composite rankings for the class of 2020 before playing two seasons at DePaul and another at St. John’s.

This wasn’t the way the return of Memphis basketball was supposed to happen, but — now that the buzz of his hire has faded — Hardaway might actually have the Tigers pointed toward a March Madness run.

The remaining unbeatens

The new year begins with just three teams among the ranks of the unbeaten.

Houston, James Madison and Ole Miss — not exactly the triumvirate of college basketball — are the only perfect teams in the sport. Who will stay that way the longest?

Houston is obviously viewed as the best of the trio, ranked No. 3 in the latest AP poll and holding the No. 1 position nationally in both the KenPom and NET ratings. The Cougars haven’t done much so far — their best win is probably either Texas A&M, Utah or on the road at Xavier, take your pick — but the competition is about to get a whole lot tougher. They get their first taste of Big 12 play starting this weekend.

James Madison, ranked No. 19, has been an improbable story, the Dukes of the Sun Belt upsetting Michigan State on the season’s opening night before running through a list of mostly no-names to get to their current 13-0 record. The best team they’ll play from here is Appalachian State.

Ole Miss, in its first season under new head coach Chris Beard, counts an 80-77 home win over Memphis as its only victory against a KenPom top 50 opponent, with No. 5 Tennessee looming in the SEC opener Saturday night. The No. 22-ranked Rebels are likely to be the first to fall.

Elsewhere in Kentucky

UK is in contention for one of the top seed lines in the 2024 NCAA Tournament.

Will anyone else from the Bluegrass join the Wildcats in this year’s March Madness?

The clearest choice for a No. 2 from Kentucky is Morehead State, led by former Calipari staffer Preston Spradlin, who took the Eagles to the 2021 NCAA Tournament and has weathered transfer-portal poachers from bigger-name schools to maintain a winning culture over the past three and a half seasons.

The Pikeville native and Betsy Layne High School grad led Morehead State into conference play over the weekend with a 9-4 record — the team’s only losses coming to Alabama, Purdue, Penn State and Indiana. And the Eagles are the clear favorite to win the OVC this season, beginning this week with a KenPom rating of No. 132 nationally, 96 spots better than the conference’s next-best team.

Anything can happen in a one-bid league’s conference tournament, obviously, but Morehead State appears to be the cream of the crop in the OVC to this point. If Spradlin can lead the Eagles to a second NCAA Tournament in four seasons, it would be just the fourth March Madness appearance by the school in the past four decades.

The only other in-state program that ranks in the top five in their league — according to the KenPom ratings — is Western Kentucky, which is fourth in the one-bid Conference USA, behind Liberty, Louisiana Tech and Jacksonville State.

UK fans who like a Cinderella to root for in March should be pulling for Morehead State the rest of the way.

UK’s next game

No. 6 Kentucky at Florida

When: 12:30 p.m. Saturday

TV: ESPN

Radio: WLAP-AM 630, WBUL-FM 98.1

Records: Kentucky 10-2 (0-0 SEC), Florida 10-3 (0-0)

Series: Kentucky leads 109-41

Last meeting: Kentucky won 82-74 on Feb. 22, 2023, in Gainesville

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