Otega Oweh’s 2024-25 Kentucky highlight reel is a déjà vu loop. There’s Oweh driving through traffic for a one-handed dunk against Texas A&M. There he is again, barging his way for a basket against Oklahoma. In another game against the Sooners, this time on the road, he posterizes a defender with a two-hand slam. On and on it goes.
Oweh, the Wildcats’ 6-foot-4, 220-pound senior, is a downhill player, but as the film clearly illustrates, he’s taken the art of getting to the rack to another level. Not that he can’t shoot, but he prefers to put his head down and blitzkrieg the rim. Opponents know he’s coming, but few can stop him. Last season, Oweh led Kentucky with 47 dunks, some coming off his ability as a defender. He’s a menace in passing lanes, and once he picks a ball out of the air, he’s racing to the other end, usually for a slam.
Psychologists have long believed we are all products of our environment. That theory tracks with Oweh. He grew up with two older brothers, both of whom played college football. One, 6-foot-5, 265-pound Odafe Oweh, a former Penn State star and first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Ravens, is now playing for the Los Angeles Chargers. The other, 6-foot-3, 200-pound Kaylen, played at Monmouth. In their younger days, when the Oweh brothers got together to play hoops, those encounters could be measured on the Richter scale. They weren’t always friendly.
“Sibling stuff,” Oweh tells Hoops HQ, laughing. “That happens in every household.”
Well, maybe not to this degree. Jousting with older brothers — Odafe is a linebacker, and Kaylen was a defensive back — trained to hit people added some extra sauce to their games of King of the Court or 21. Like his siblings, Otega Oweh is no lightweight. The dude looks like he’s chiseled out of granite. Because the brothers didn’t call fouls — “Fouls just prolong the game,” Otega says — their games became survival of the fittest and prepared the youngest Oweh for the sport he eventually pursued in college. Some people gave him grief because he didn’t follow his brothers into football, but Oweh chose to follow his passion.
So far, so good.
Last season, Oweh (16.2 points per game) led Kentucky in scoring and to the NCAA Tournament’s Sweet Sixteen. After giving the NBA Draft serious consideration, he decided to come back and see how much farther the Wildcats can advance in 2025-26. Pundits are expecting Oweh’s fingerprints to be all over any success the Wildcats have. He’s appeared on numerous preseason All-America teams, was voted by SEC coaches and media members who cover the league as their Preseason Player of the Year, was chosen to the 20-player watch list for the Jerry West Shooting Guard of the Year award, and is also on the watch lists for NABC, USBWA, and Naismith National Player of the Year honors. The Wildcats are a consensus preseason top 10 pick and justified that ranking — albeit in an exhibition game played at home — by beating No. 1-ranked Purdue on Oct. 24.
Two games into this season, albeit not against the caliber of competition the Wildcats will face later, Oweh is up to his old tricks. Averaging 14 points, second on the team behind Collin Chandler’s 14.5, he’s shooting 52.1 percent from the field and making 57.1 percent of his two-point attempts. He’s taken only five three-pointers, but made two. That’s 40 percent.
If Kentucky does advance farther into March and even April than it did last season, part of that journey can be traced to those driveway rumbles between the Oweh brothers. Otega Oweh didn’t just learn to play with physicality. He found out basketball, like football, wasn’t a game for the meek. Aggression was a requirement, not an option. And perhaps the most important lesson was this — losing isn’t acceptable.
Coaches treasure those traits.
“A natural nose for the ball, which Otega has, a natural tenacity, which he has…I don’t know if that can be taught or learned,” Kentucky associate head coach Mark Fox tells Hoops HQ. “He has a natural drive that is different than most people.”
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How does Fox define “natural drive?”
“Otega touches every part of the winning formula,” Fox says. “He can score it. He’ll make threes. He draws fouls. He can be a game wrecker on defense and guard the other team’s best player. He’s extremely competitive. He makes everybody around him better.”
That’s been true at every stage of Oweh’s career, even on a stacked AAU team that included five-star recruits Derek Lively II (Duke), Jalen Duren (Memphis) and Justin Edwards (Kentucky) and four-star Corey Floyd (UConn, Providence). In 2020, Pennsylvania-based Team Final won the 17U Peach Jam championship. Oweh was voted Nike EYBL Peach Jam Breakout Player of the Session after averaging 14.9 points, 4.9 rebounds, 1.8 steals and 1.3 assists.
That performance impressed recruiters from several top programs, but one put an especially aggressive full-court press on him.
Duke associate head coach Emmanuel Dildy, then working on Porter Moser’s staff at Oklahoma, knew the Sooners had to sign Oweh. “In our first year at Oklahoma, we needed to find some talent that could play in the top end of the Big 12,” Dildy tells Hoops HQ. “Otega had the athleticism, the first step, the ability to draw fouls. He lived at the free-throw line. He had size for the (wing) position. Those were all things we could use.”
Dildy made frequent visits to New Jersey’s Blair Academy, where Oweh played, and eventually built a level of trust that would compel Oweh to travel so far from home for college. The Oklahoma coaches quickly found out Oweh’s skills, some of them intangible, would translate to the Big 12. “He’s got this competitive streak and a chip on his shoulder from being the youngest brother,” Dildy says. “He’s been beaten up and pushed around and fouled. But he was always ready for the moment, and he was always willing to get better.”
Dildy was hired by Duke coach Jon Scheyer in August of 2023, but earlier that summer, Dildy worked out Oweh relentlessly.
“Before I left for Duke, all that summer, I was telling him, ‘You’re in bad shape,’” Dildy says. “He was a good athlete, but he was still in high-school shape. Half the time he was coasting because he was tired. So, three days a week, we’d get up at six in the morning, and he would run 200s and 400s, trying to get him in better shape. In a way, it was like punishment, making a guy run on the track at 6 a.m. outside of the work he was already putting in. A lot of guys would have said no. But he didn’t look at it that way. That let me know the kid had what it takes.”
The hard work paid off. After starting nine games and averaging 4.8 points as freshman in 2022-23, Oweh bumped his scoring average to 11.4 the next season. He started 28 times and improved his three-point shooting from 25 percent to 38. In the spring of 2024, with Dildy having departed for Duke and Oweh hungry for even more challenges, he entered the NCAA transfer portal. Mark Pope, who had left BYU and taken over at Kentucky after the abrupt departure of former coach John Calipari to Arkansas, was looking for players who could operate in his fast-paced system, but most of all, he wanted competitors.
“His tenacity on the court is contagious and his humility off the court is going to endear himself to Big Blue Nation,” Pope said after Oweh signed in the spring of 2024.
Pope’s prediction turned out to be true. Oweh started all 36 games and was the heart and soul of a good team that was plagued by injuries. Despite missing several key players in January, February and March and partly because of the sheer force of Oweh’s will, the Wildcats built a solid NCAA Tournament resume. Two of their wins came over Oweh’s former team, Oklahoma, and in each of them, Oweh made the game-winning shot. Nothing personal, he says.
“That storyline was crazy,” Oweh says. “But I was just trying to win the games. I try to look at every game the same. When you put the pressure on yourself to win, that’s when you create inconsistency.”
The Wildcats advanced to the Sweet Sixteen, where they lost to SEC rival Tennessee, a team they had beaten twice in the regular season. After the Wildcats’ season ended, Oweh explored his NBA Draft opportunities, creating some anxious moments for Pope and his staff.
“I went out to see him twice where he was training,” Fox says. “It came down to the last few workouts. But he has a great relationship with our coaches. He communicated very directly with coach Pope and me. He flourished under coach Pope’s style of play. That is something he values, so why not experience it for just one year? Why not keep growing?”
Suffice it to say when Oweh decided to return to Lexington, the Kentucky coaches were elated.
“A lot went into that decision,” Oweh says. “It came down to the wire. But I got great feedback, and the whole process was really positive. I already knew the questions about my game. (NBA scouts) wanted to see me have a similar year to last year. They wanted to see me take more threes. I felt like that’s something I can do. So why not come back to one of the greatest schools in history and have another go at it? Winning a championship…if we do that, everyone on our team could benefit.”
During the spring and summer, Oweh took hundreds of three-point shots to fine-tune his mechanics and his consistency. And he and Fox, as the coach put it, “got into the weeds,” working on some specific aspects of Oweh’s game. “We worked harder on his ability to pass with his left hand,” Fox says. “We improved his ability to read defenses behind ball-screen coverage. He improved his (shooting) range and sped up his release. He’s that level of player, where you’re working on some pretty detailed things.”
Kentucky suffered heavy personnel losses after last season, and though Pope and his staff retooled with some astute recruiting, Oweh is once again the hub around which this team will function. The media doesn’t have to be convinced, as evidenced by his lengthy list of preseason honors. Oweh was pleased with the recognition, but…
“It’s not going to change anything I do on the court,” Oweh says. “That’s what I keep telling myself. I’ve still got to go out there and perform. They’re preseason awards, not postseason awards. If anything, they add to my hunger.”
Oweh’s hope is to transform himself from a low-first round NBA Draft pick, which he probably would have been last year, to a lottery pick. Those who know him best believe that will happen.
“One hundred percent,” Dildy says. “With his size and ability to defend several positions on the perimeter, he’s already an asset. He has to increase his volume of threes, make sure he stays around the same percentage as last year, and shoot corner threes at a 40-percent clip. I think he will do that. You can never count that kid out. When we first got him at Oklahoma, nobody would have said he’d become SEC Preseason Player of the Year. But he’s a worker. When that award was announced, I texted him and told him how proud I was of him. But he’s got so much more in front of him.”
