The biggest basketball rivalry in the Bluegrass State is back. Pat Kelsey and Mark Pope have both injected new life into their respective programs, and that’s translating into major recruiting battles between the longtime in-state foes. The biggest showdown is over the No. 1 player in the 2026 class and a Louisville native, Tyran Stokes, but Stokes isn’t the only five-star that the Cardinals and Wildcats are both pursuing.
Five-star point guard Taylen Kinney, a former teammate of 2025 Kentucky commit Jasper Johnson, is another priority target for both programs. Kinney is heading to Lexington on Tuesday for his official visit with the Wildcats. With his ties to the program through Johnson, Kinney was recently interviewed by Kentucky Sports Radio and gave a quote that will leave Cardinals fans smiling.
“We got a great relationship, a great relationship,” Kinney told KSR’s Jack Pilgrim of the Louisville basketball program. “Louisville fans are definitely pulling for me, I don’t know about Kentucky fans. They said a couple things that are crazy. But they’re definitely pulling for me, some of them, they just say stuff about other players.”
That doesn’t sound like a recruit who is in love with the idea of Big Blue Nation breathing down his neck every second of his collegiate career. There is a certain pressure that comes with playing at Kentucky that players can avoid at a program like Louisville, and when it comes to Kinney, that welcoming environment could be a massive recruiting advantage.
Pat Kelsey continues to prove himself as an elite recruiter
Louisville’s Year 1 turnaround under Kelsey was almost exclusively thanks to transfer portal additions such as Chucky Hepburn and Terrence Edwards Jr., but in the 2025 recruiting cycle, Kelsey proved that he’s more than a one-trick pony.
College basketball has continually gotten older, and this year, there wasn’t a single freshman on the floor in the national championship game. However, one of those title-game participants, Houston, has the No. 2 high school class in the country arriving in 2025. To be sustainably built in modern college basketball, you have to do both, portal and high school, and Kelsey is following that blueprint.
Louisville’s 2025 class is headlined by five-star point guard Mikel Brown Jr., who should seamlessly replace Hepburn before likely heading to the NBA as a one-and-done. Kinney could be next in line as the No. 1-ranked point guard and No. 14 overall player in the 2026 class.
Kelsey does not yet have a 2026 commit, and Stokes is the ultimate prize in the class, but Kinney, the 6-foot-1, 185-pound prospect from Atlanta, Georgia, may be the second-most important player to monitor and continue to support this offseason because clearly he’s feeling the love from the Louisville faithful.