LEXINGTON, Ky. — It might be the most anticipated preseason game in the history of college basketball.

That’s exactly the vibe that Matt Painter and Mark Pope were going for when they set it up.

On Friday night in Rupp Arena, the ninth-ranked Kentucky Wildcats will host the Purdue Boilermakers, who enter the 2025-26 season as the No. 1 team in the country.

This contest won’t count for any record books. Technically, it’s an exhibition game. But it’s not going to feel like one for the home team, the visitors or the 20,000 or so fans that pack the stands.

For the two head coaches with realistic dreams of playing for a national championship in April, this October meeting might be low stakes in the grand scheme of things. But it’s precisely what both were looking for when they started putting together their 2025-26 schedules.

For Pope’s program, the arrangement couldn’t make any more sense.

The Wildcats will get an early test against the team regarded to be the best in the sport, a veteran group led by one of the most respected coaches in the game and anchored by senior point guard Braden Smith, the odds-on favorite to earn national player of the year honors.

And with the Cats hosting, it means they control the gate. So, it’s a guaranteed sell out before the season even begins — never a bad thing in this college sports landscape where every dollar of revenue counts — as well as an opportunity for UK fans to see their new team face off against one of the best squads in the country.

So, what’s in it for the Boilermakers? An exhibition on their own home court would make a lot of sense from a monetary standpoint. They sold out their only home preseason game last year — 14,876 packing Mackey Arena — and would surely do the same for two more this fall. With every athletics department in the country seemingly obsessed with raising as much money as possible to offset revenue-sharing responsibilities in this new world of NIL, one more packed house would be beneficial.

Purdue was looking for something a little different with this matchup.

“From our standpoint, there’s probably nothing better than to get tested in a good environment on the road,” said Elliot Bloom, the program’s director of basketball operations. “So that’s where a lot of the value in it comes for us.”

It all came together months ago. Bloom, who is entering his 18th season in his current role, and Painter — the head coach at Purdue since 2005 — work hand in hand on the team’s schedule each offseason. Painter knew he wanted to play a tough team in a difficult atmosphere. Kentucky’s name came up, and the Cats had a connection.

UK associate coach Mark Fox — a Division I head coach for nearly two decades who seems to know just about everybody in the business — has had a good relationship with Painter for years.

“So we were just talking one day about, ‘Where should we want to try to go play an exhibition game, potentially?’ And Kentucky’s name was one of several that we kind of talked about,” Bloom said. “And Coach was like, ‘Yeah, let me text Coach Fox and see what’s going on.’ And we had some mutual interest there, so it kind of went from there.”

It was a no-brainer on UK’s end.

Bloom said rosters for the 2025-26 season weren’t even settled when Purdue reached out with the idea, but everyone in college basketball knew the Boilermakers would be returning one of the best groups in the country. Hypercompetitive game? Check.

And Kentucky is paying Purdue a sum of $90,000 to come play — according to a copy of the contract obtained by the Lexington Herald-Leader — but that’s actually a little less than what UK paid nearly all of its mid-major home opponents during the last regular season. And the Boilermakers weren’t asking for a return game for next season. So, retaining scheduling flexibility moving forward? Check.

Bloom said the $90,000 for this trip won’t even go toward NIL. After expenses for the game in Rupp are paid, the remainder will simply go into the team’s general travel budget.

For Purdue, this is all about preparing for what it hopes will be a national title season.

Kentucky vs. Purdue

Bloom explained that Painter has operated like this in the past, and new NCAA rules are just allowing the Boilermakers to be more open with their pursuit of preseason competition.

Those new rules, which went into effect this year, allow for Division I teams to play each other in exhibition games. In the past, such games had to have some sort of charitable tie, so any revenue that came from them would have to go to a specific cause independent of the teams’ athletic pursuits, and the NCAA had to sign off on it in advance.

Two years ago, Purdue played at Arkansas in a preseason game, with the money then donated to tornado relief efforts in that state. Last year, they played at Creighton in another charity game for tornado relief. In both cases, they lost. But each of those contests gave them a tough preseason test against a top-15 team with nothing real on the line. Two seasons ago, Purdue ended up going to the national title game. Last season, it was a trip to the Sweet 16.

“We try to test ourselves,” Bloom said. “If you’re going to do that, it makes sense to do kind of a high-end exhibition game where you’re getting tested early, so that you have a better chance at those nonconference games. And then, ultimately, once league play starts, it’s not the first time you’re walking into a raucous gym with a big crowd and a good team.

“You’ve already kind of been down that road before, and I think that helps when you get into league play. You’ve kind of already been there, done that.”

He said that Purdue typically tries to get six high-major nonconference games on the schedule, in addition to the 20-game Big Ten slate. This year, the Boilermakers will play at No. 15 Alabama on Nov. 13 — the second week of the regular season — with two games in the Bahamas against high-major competition, plus home games against No. 16 Iowa State and Marquette, in addition to a contest versus No. 20 Auburn in Indianapolis.

The trip to Kentucky this week will serve as a dry run, of sorts, for all of that.

“That’s kind of the goal. On Nov. 13, when we go to Tuscaloosa, you know it’s going to be a good environment,” Bloom said. “All the things that we’re going to do on the trip to Lexington in October — hopefully when we make the trip to Tuscaloosa in November, we don’t have that learning curve. You hope that it feels like, ‘OK, we just did this a couple of weeks ago.’

“I think sometimes people don’t realize that, at the end of the day, it’s still 18-to-22-year-olds. In our case, we’ve got a couple freshmen and a couple transfers, and so now it’s going to be their first time traveling with Purdue basketball. So, ‘How do we travel? How does that feel? How do we do things?’ You know, all that stuff is important. And if you can do that in a high-level environment, in a game that doesn’t really hurt you … to go through all that experience and learn from it to help you during the regular season, I think it is a really good advantage.”

Before the charity games got popular, some teams would take part in so-called “secret scrimmages” as a way of playing some elite competition early on. The only alternative to that was the most popular one — and the one UK almost exclusively followed — which would have been to play a team from a lower division within the NCAA. Not the best of tests for anyone with national title hopes.

Bloom said Purdue played West Virginia in secret scrimmages for three or four years in a row when Bob Huggins was coaching the Mountaineers. Before that, Purdue and Providence played behind closed doors.

“We would try to find some teams that we felt like our team would have trouble with — maybe styles of play,” he said. “Back when they were secret scrimmages, we were playing West Virginia, when Huggins was there. Because they pressed and really got up in you and stuff. And we thought, ‘Man, that’s perfect.’ Because we were not really built that way — or we weren’t at the time — and so we really try to test our guys and maybe expose some weaknesses so we can work on them.”

Those two sides would meet about halfway — at Ohio Dominican University in Columbus — and while the competition was great, the atmosphere was not. Two teams, three referees, no fans.

“When you play a secret scrimmage, you’re showing up to an empty gym,” Bloom said. “And it’s still not a gameday feel. This game will be. We’ll have a shootaround during the morning. It’ll feel like a real road game from every aspect of travel. So that’s a really important piece of all this.”

Bloom said there was never a conversation with UK about a return game in West Lafayette for next preseason, because Purdue is expecting to follow the same formula: one tough game on the road, one exhibition for the fans at home. (The Boilermakers will host the University of Indianapolis, a Division II program, next week.)

UK, meanwhile, will host Georgetown University on Oct. 30 in Rupp — the Hoyas will get $85,000 for that game, according to the contract details — in what should be another preseason treat for fans.

Purdue has played Kentucky in Lexington only three times, and the lone matchup in Rupp Arena came during the 1979-80 season. The two sides haven’t met anywhere since 1997. That was a battle of top-10 teams, too, and Tubby Smith’s Cats went on to win the national title.

Painter and Pope each hope their upcoming season ends in the same fashion.

And for both, the beginning comes Friday night in Rupp, friendly confines for the Wildcats and a fun opportunity for the Boilermakers.

“All of our staff and players — we’re all basketball fans,” Bloom said. “They know the landscape of college basketball, and they know the history and the significance of that building. So that’ll be a cool thing to be able to experience a gameday there … just to kind of experience one of the great cathedrals of college basketball.”

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