LEXINGTON, Ky. — One season ago, Mark Pope’s first Kentucky men’s basketball team made history the second the Wildcats hit the court for game action.

Inheriting a roster with no returning scholarship players from his predecessor, Pope scrambled and put together a veteran-heavy team that boasted a whopping 586 combined, previous college starts.

With six super-seniors taking advantage of the NCAA-granted “free COVID year” and another conventional senior on the team, the 2024-25 Cats were, by the metric of college games previously started, the most experienced team ever to take the floor for the University of Kentucky.

UK reaped some benefits from a roster stocked with grizzled veterans. When Kentucky rallied from nine down in the final 13 minutes to upset No. 6 Duke, 77-72, in the Champions Classic last Nov. 12, Blue Devils coach Jon Scheyer saluted UK’s display of mature know-how.

“Give Kentucky credit for the plays they made,” Scheyer said in the postgame. “I thought they showed incredible maturity. Their experience came out in the second half.”

Alas, the Wildcats also gleaned some drawbacks likely related to having a roster filled with players who had “a lot of tread worn off the tires.”

Three of the six super-seniors Kentucky entered 2024-25 with either saw their seasons ended prematurely by injuries or saw their play late in the season hampered by physical issues.

Which brings us to 2025-26 and the second roster Pope has constructed for Kentucky men’s basketball.

The current Cats will carry a combined total of 220 career college starts into the coming season: Otega Oweh (73 career starts, 36 at Kentucky, 37 at Oklahoma); Jaland Lowe (50 at Pittsburgh); Brandon Garrison (29, all at Oklahoma State); Kam Williams (28 at Tulane); Jayden Quaintance (24 at Arizona State); Reece Potter (11 at Miami, the Ohio version); and Denzell Aberdeen (five at Florida).

On the one hand, UK will enter the coming season with only 37.54% of the combined career starts it had on its roster at the start of last season.

Conversely, 220 previous starts on the 2025-26 Kentucky roster would have been the third most-experienced team of the John Calipari coaching era. Six of the 15 teams Cal coached at UK entered the season with fewer than 60 returning career starts on their rosters.

Only Calipari’s 2021-22 team (367 career starts) and 2022-23 squad (262) had more than 220.

Experience alone does not equate to “Kentucky-level” success. Calipari’s 2021-22 and 2022-23 Cats combined to go 1-2 in NCAA Tournament games — and the former, starting a super-senior, three juniors and one freshman, lost to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in the round of 64.

Yet recent NCAA tourney history suggests that championships cannot be won without a veteran-heavy roster.

In the past 10 years — and, you will recall, there was no NCAA Tournament in one of those years, 2020 — there have been exactly three true freshmen who started for national title-winning teams:

— Jalen Brunson averaged 9.6 points and 2.5 assists as a true frosh starting for 2016 NCAA champion Villanova;

— Kihei Clark contributed 4.5 points and 2.6 assists a game for 2019 national champ Virginia;

— Stephon Castle averaged 11.1 points, 4.7 rebounds and 2.9 assists for 2022 national title winner Connecticut.

Of the 45 players who have started for national title teams since 2016, 36 had been in college at least three years when their teams cut down the nets — and 42 had been in school at least two years.

UConn’s Castle is the only player who subsequently went into the NBA draft as a one-and-done player to play on a national championship team since the Duke trio of Jahlil Okafor, Justise Winslow and Tyus Jones did it in 2015.

If Calipari ushered in men’s college basketball’s “one-and-done era” with John Wall, Demarcus Cousins and Eric Bledsoe at UK in 2009-10, it is clear in retrospect that the era ended with Duke’s 2015 national title starting three one-and-dones.

In a sense, the use of “combined previous games started” as a metric to measure team experience does not fully reflect the veteran reality of the Kentucky roster Pope has assembled for 2025-26.

Aberdeen, the former Florida guard, may have made only five career starts for the Gators, but the experience he gained as a valued reserve during last season’s NCAA title run will likely compensate for the lack of starting lineup appearances he made in Gainesville.

The same is true of ex-Alabama forward Dioubate, who never started a game in his two seasons with the Crimson Tide but was a contributing reserve on Bama teams that reached the 2024 Final Four and the 2025 round of eight.

In terms of combined previous career starts, Kentucky is nowhere close to as experienced as it was last season. The 2025-26 Wildcats are, however, substantially more experienced than most Calipari-era UK teams were.

In roster construction terms, Mark Pope is betting on that being the “sweet spot” for Kentucky.

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