The UNC men’s basketball team will visit Kentucky the night of Tuesday, December 2 and the UNC women’s team will visit Texas the night of Thursday, December 4 as part of the 2025 ACC-SEC Challenge, ESPN announced Thursday.

The men’s team’s clash with the Wildcats will be the first matchup between the two teams since Kentucky hired head coach Mark Pope. The 2025-26 season will be Pope’s second in Lexington following the departure of longtime head coach John Calipari. The game would also be the first time UNC has visited Kentucky’s Rupp Arena since the 2014-15 season, when the top-ranked Wildcats won 84-70.

In past seasons, the two programs maintained a home-and-home series, with the two teams visiting each other in corresponding years. However, that deal was abandoned following the inception of the CBS Sports Classic, a four-team event featuring both the Wildcats and Tar Heels. The teams have not played on each others’ campuses since the matchup in Lexington in 2014.

Overall, UNC has dropped seven of its last 10 meetings with Kentucky, including both games under head coach Hubert Davis. Carolina has not beaten the Wildcats on the road since 2007, having lost its last three games at Rupp Arena.

On the women’s side, Carolina will play in Austin for the first time in program history. It’s just the second ever meeting between the Tar Heels and Longhorns; UNC defeated Texas 75-73 on January 11, 1981 in Chapel Hill.

The Longhorns are coming off two consecutive 30-win seasons. In its first year in the SEC in 2024-25, Texas finished 35-4 overall and 15-1 in league play on its way to a second consecutive No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament an appearance in the Final Four. Texas has reached at least the Elite Eight in four of the last five NCAA Tournaments.

The 2025-26 season will be the third featuring the ACC-SEC Challenge. The UNC men have split their first two games of the annual event, beating Tennessee in 2023 and falling to Alabama in 2024. Both games were in Chapel Hill. The women are also 1-1, losing to South Carolina in 2023 and beating Kentucky in 2024.

 

Featured image via Associated Press/Brynn Anderson

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