Kentucky football snubbed from debut US LBM coaches poll
NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos...
There was real energy building in Lexington around the Kentucky football team this summer. A new coach with a sharp offensive résumé. A staff pulled from two of the sport's best offensive rooms. A fanbase was ready to exhale after two miserable seasons, and then Tuesday happened.
USA TODAY Sports revealed the debut 2026 US LBM Coaches Poll, and the Wildcats weren't just left out of the Top 25. They didn't get a single vote. Not one. In a poll where 28 teams outside the rankings picked up at least some support, Kentucky was shut out entirely — grouped with Arkansas and Mississippi State as the only three SEC programs the panel of coaches couldn't be bothered to acknowledge.
For a fan base that spent the offseason talking itself into Year 1 of the Will Stein era, that's a gut punch. It's also, in the grand scheme of a 12-game season that hasn't kicked a single ball yet, close to meaningless. More on that in a minute. First, the poll.
The Full Debut Top 25
- Ohio State
- Oregon
- Georgia
- Texas
- Notre Dame
- Indiana
- Miami
- Texas A&M
- Oklahoma
- Ole Miss
- Alabama
- Texas Tech
- LSU
- USC
- BYU
- Michigan
- Penn State
- Tennessee
- Washington
- SMU
- Utah
- Iowa
- Clemson
- Houston
- Missouri
Ohio State opened at No. 1 with the bulk of the first-place votes, but for the first time since 2008, six different teams—Ohio State, Oregon, and Indiana out of the Big Ten; Georgia and Texas from the SEC; and independent Notre Dame—pulled in at least one first-place vote. That's a preseason poll with almost no consensus at the top, which tells you something about how muddled this season is expected to be before anyone's even played a down.
Others receiving votes: Louisville, Florida, TCU, Illinois, South Carolina, Arizona, Virginia, Vanderbilt, Auburn, Georgia Tech, Boise State, Oklahoma State, UNLV, North Carolina State, Florida State, Virginia Tech, Nebraska, Memphis, Arizona State, James Madison, Duke, Pittsburgh, New Mexico, Western Michigan, Navy, San Diego State, Kansas State, Jacksonville State, Hawaii, California.
Kentucky's name is nowhere on that list either.
The SEC Is Loaded—Kentucky Just Isn't Part of the Conversation Yet
This is the part that stings for Big Blue Nation. The SEC has more depth in this poll than any other league. Nine SEC teams cracked the Top 25: Georgia (3), Texas (4), Texas A&M (8), Oklahoma (9), Ole Miss (10), Alabama (11), LSU (13), Tennessee (18), and Missouri (25). Four more—Florida, South Carolina, Auburn, and Vanderbilt—picked up votes without cracking the rankings. That's 13 of the conference's 16 teams with at least some support from the coaches.
Kentucky, a program that plays Alabama, LSU, Texas A&M, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Florida, and Missouri this fall, was not one of them.
Why This Isn't a Red Alert
Here's the thing about a zero-vote preseason poll: it's a report card on last season, not a projection of this one. Kentucky went 5-7 and 4-8 the last two years under Mark Stoops, capped by a 41-0 no-show against Louisville that ended his 13-year run in Lexington. Coaches vote off what they watched on tape, and what they watched was a program that had gone stale on offense and was bowl-ineligible in back-to-back seasons. That's the résumé the poll graded. It's not wrong about the past.
What it can't measure yet is the overhaul. Will Stein, 36, spent three years as Oregon's offensive coordinator before Kentucky hired him in December, and he brought in Joe Sloan—the coordinator who helped engineer a Heisman-caliber season at LSU—to run the offense. That's real pedigree, and it's exactly the kind of thing preseason polls consistently underweight, because there's no game tape yet to prove it translates.
There's also this: preseason polls are historically bad predictors. Every year, teams picked to finish in the muck crash the New Year's bowl picture, and preseason darlings quietly fade by Halloween. A zero-vote debut is a data point, not a verdict. Kentucky hasn't lost a game this season. It hasn't won one either. The Wildcats open Sept. 5 against Youngstown State, then get thrown straight into the fire with Alabama at home and a trip to Texas A&M before the calendar even turns to October — a brutal, nine-game SEC slate that will tell the real story far better than a poll released before fall camp broke.
If anything, getting skipped entirely gives Stein's first team a cleaner narrative to write: nobody outside Lexington believes in this yet. That's a storyline, not a crisis. Ask BYU, which has spent recent years using playoff snubs as fuel rather than proof of inadequacy. The coaches poll will look completely different by Halloween. Kentucky's job now is simple—make sure it looks different because of what happens on the field, not because of what a preseason ballot assumed in early August.
This article originally appeared on UK Wildcats Wire: Kentucky football snubbed from debut US LBM coaches poll
More at NCAAF College Football News, Photos, Stats, Scores, Schedule & Videos