Stop me if you’ve heard this before: The Kentucky football team has one of the most difficult schedules in college football this fall. That will once again be the case in 2025 and there are numbers to back that up.

This should not be too terribly surprising. The 2024 Kentucky football schedule was the eighth-most difficult in the country, according to ESPN FPI. This year’s schedule is pretty much the same. There are a few different schools from the MAC, but the SEC opponents remain unchanged, just the venue where the games will be played.

ESPN’s Bill Connelly recently released the initial 2025 ESPN SP+ Rankings. The forward-thinking metric had to be adjusted in recent years for transfer portal movement, but this power rating does a good job of forecasting matchups between opponents. I like to think of it as the KenPom of college football.

Kentucky ranks No. 40 overall in the first SP+ rankings, with the No. 73 offense, No. 25 defense, and No. 14 special teams unit. The Cats are ahead of only two other SEC programs, Vanderbilt (54) and Mississippi State (65). It’s probably not a coincidence that these three teams each have some of the ten most difficult schedules in the country this fall.

Using this initial SP+ data, Kentucky once again ranks No. 8 in strength of schedule. The Wildcats will host No. 7 Texas, No. 8 Tennessee, and No. 9 Ole Miss at Kroger Field. The current data has the Cats around a two-touchdown home underdog for each one of those games. No. 17 Florida is also on the home schedule. Kentucky will travel to No. 16 South Carolina, No. 22 Louisville and No. 23 Auburn.

“It is a tough business we’re in, it is a tough league, and it is going to be a tough schedule,” Mark Stoops last week. “So the only thing we can manage is the day-to-day, and attacking that day.

“I’ve talked about this before. If you look at it in its entirety, there is so much to do. But that’s good. That gives us a bunch of juice, a bunch of energy that there is so much to do today, like truly so much to attack that day. That is creating excitement around the building. I tell the players, let’s be on tilt today, let’s be fourth and one today, and really ramp up the intensity… I feel it in the building.”

Aug. 30: vs. Toledo – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Sept 6: vs. Ole Miss – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Sep. 13: vs. Eastern Michigan – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Sept. 20: OPEN
Sept. 27: at South Carolina – Williams-Brice Stadium (Columbia, SC)
Oct. 4: at Georgia – Sanford Stadium (Athens, GA)
Oct. 11: OPEN
Oct. 18: vs. Texas – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Oct. 25: vs. Tennessee – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Nov. 1: at Auburn- Jordan-Hare Stadium (Auburn, AL)
Nov. 8: vs. Florida – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Nov. 15: vs. Tennessee Tech – Kroger Field (Lexington, KY)
Nov. 22: at Vanderbilt – FirstBank Stadium (Nashville, TN)
Nov. 29: at Louisville – L&N Stadium (Louisville, KY)

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