Aside from Louisville, Kentucky product and No. 1 overall recruit in the 2026 class, Tyran Stokes, 5-star point guard Taylen Kinney is Pat Kelsey’s other clear top target. The Cardinals are reportedly all-in on Kinney, who plays for the Overtime Elite League and had a “great” official visit to the program in early June. However, some big competition just entered the race for the 6-foot-2, Atlanta, Georgia, product.
According to Joe Tipton of On3/Rivals, Kinney has scheduled official visits with Texas and Indiana. The Longhorns, now led by Sean Miller, also finally offered the five-star on Monday as they scheduled their visit with him for September 12. Kinney is slated to visit Bloomington and the Hoosiers’ new head coach Darian DeVries on August 29, and also has a visit scheduled with Oregon for September 6.
2026 Top-20 overall recruit Tay Kinney has scheduled official visits to Texas and Indiana, source told @Rivals.
— Joe Tipton (@TiptonEdits) July 7, 2025
The 6-2 rising senior is one of the top point guards in the country. https://t.co/LW7my8OZfz pic.twitter.com/XabVv2TcGI
Tay Kinney schedules official visits with Texas and Indiana
Though it’s a crowded recruitment, Louisville is viewed as one of the favorites to land Kinney, but these official visits should put Kelsey on notice. While it will always be a football school, Texas is a big-money program that can draw major NIL opportunities to add additional payment outside of the revenue-sharing pool that every team can use to pay athletes directly. Indiana has a similar cache as a national brand, as well as a long history as a blue-blood.
The blue-blood advantage is threefold. 1. Those programs can lean on their immense history to appeal to recruits (though that is waning for Indiana without much recent success. 2. Players can leverage that blue blood brand into marketing opportunities with a rabid fan base and big-money boosters. 3. And this is a new one, basketball schools like Indiana (and in many ways this is true for Louisville) will likely spend a higher percentage of their $20.5 million revenue-sharing pool on basketball, allowing them to outbid football schools for top prospects.
Louisville shares some of those same advantages and should still be considered one of the front runners for Kinney, but with more big-money and big-name schools seriously entering his recruitment, it could drive the price up for his services, and with a large portion of the revenue-sharing money likely set aside for Stokes (if he chooses the Cardinals), it could be tough to pay both in the same recruiting class.
Kelsey’s 2025 five-star point guard, Mikel Brown Jr., is already generating massive buzz with his FIBA U19 Men's World Cup performance for Team USA. That makes locking down his successor even more important because he appears to be on a one-and-done trajectory. Kelsey wants that player to be Kinney, but he may have to pay a steep price to make that happen.