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Jeff Borzello
St. John’s is expected to replace UCLA in the CBS Sports Classic and is set to face Kentucky in next season’s event, sources confirmed to ESPN on Thursday.
The annual four-team doubleheader debuted in 2014 and has featured North Carolina, Ohio State, Kentucky and UCLA in each of the past 11 seasons.
Should St. John’s and Kentucky face off as expected, as first reported by the Eye on the Storm podcast, it will put Red Storm coach Rick Pitino against his former school and player in Wildcats coach Mark Pope. Both teams were also in the top 10 of ESPN’s top 25 rankings in April.
Pitino coached at Kentucky from 1989 to 1997, leading the Wildcats to the national championship in 1996. Pope was on the national title team under Pitino and took over as Wildcats coach last spring. When Pope was tabbed to replace John Calipari, Pitino praised the hire and made an appearance at Big Blue Madness in October.
After leaving the Wildcats for an NBA stint with the Boston Celtics, Pitino returned to college coaching at Louisville in 2001 and went 6-12 against Kentucky. The St. John’s-Kentucky matchup would be Pitino’s first game against the Wildcats since 2016.
Pitino led St. John’s to the Big East regular-season and conference tournament championships in his second season at the helm in 2024-25, while Pope guided Kentucky to the Sweet 16 in his debut campaign.
While the reasons for UCLA’s withdrawal have not been made public, Bruins coach Mick Cronin has made no secret of his disdain for his team’s travel schedule during Big Ten play. UCLA and the other West Coast teams in the Big Ten face some of the most arduous travel of any power conference teams in the country.
“We have to go back four times,” Cronin said in January. “Oh, the Big Ten teams get to come to Los Angeles where it’s 70 degrees one time a year. They don’t even have to switch hotels. We are 12 miles apart. Are you kidding me? Please tell me you’re kidding me.
“We’ve seen the Statue of Liberty twice in the last three weeks while we were landing. We also saw the Capitol Building. And we’ve still got to go back, and then we’ve got to go back for the Big Ten tournament. They do it one time.”
A couple of weeks earlier, while discussing how UCLA returned from a road trip in the early hours of the morning and then had to play a couple of days later, Cronin said, “When you sell your soul to television, that’s just the way it is.”
The CBS Sports Classic took place at Madison Square Garden last season. Its location for the 2025 event has not been announced.
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