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Not only are Kentucky basketball fans hoping for another national championship in 2015, but they have their sights set on a perfect 40-0 record, which would be an all-time record for wins and cap the first undefeated season since Indiana did it in 1976, almost 40 years ago.
But sorry Wildcats faithful, it ain’t going to happen. And it’s not because John Calipari’s team isn’t good enough to do it. It’s that they might be too good.
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In games against ranked team this season, Kentucky has:
• Defeated No. 5 Kansas by 32 points.
• Defeated No. 6 Texas by 12 points.
• Defeated No. 21 North Carolina by 14 points.
• Defeated No. 8 Louisville (on the road) by 8 points. (And Kentucky was comfortable for almost the entire second half in that “close” game.)
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Since their games, Texas, UNC and Louisville have come back to earth, while only Kansas has stuck around as a legitimate top-five team. Still, those other teams will be highly-seeded come tournament time. So if Kentucky has won games against good, ranked opponents by an average of 16.5 points, why won’t they win the whole thing? Because they’ve yet to face a real challenge from a top team and, no matter how much Calipari tells them that the No. 2 seed they’ll face in the Elite Eight is a tough opponent, a college kid who vividly remembers blowing out Kansas by 32 points is going to have a hard time believing it. That’s the thing about youth: They think they’re invincible.
Before we even get to the NCAAs, let’s look at the difficulty of winning every game in the regular season and conference tournament. Amazingly, no major conference team has done that since that historic ’76 Indiana squad. In the past 35 years only two teams in total have done it: UNLV in 1991 (lost in national semifinal) and Wichita State in 2014 (lost in second round to Kentucky after the Wildcats were grossly under-seeded).
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The numbers of Ken Pomeroy, the NCAA stats guru, give Kentucky just a 65.5% chance (subscription only) of finishing the regular season undefeated and that’s with a schedule that doesn’t feature a single team currently in his top 25. (Though, to be fair Kentucky’s final regular season games are against No. 26 Arkansas, No. 35 Georgia and No. 34 Florida, but two of those games are at home.) Then, there’s 10 more games to go through. Kentucky may be 25-0, but they’re barely 60% of the way to a 40-0 record.
But back to the idea of Kentucky being too good: This is team that, so far, hasn’t had to take a punch from a worthy adversary. There were post-New Year’s hangover overtime games against Mississippi and Texas A&M. And LSU hung with Kentucky, sure, but that was an off-night for the ‘Cats against a team that lost to No. 90 Old Dominion and a horrendous Missouri team (ranked No. 201 in Pomeroy — the worst of any major-conference squad).
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Every team has a bad night, particularly when every opponent is treating the game like it’s their Super Bowl, but Kentucky has had just three, each to teams that aren’t on their level. These weren’t OT games against Virginia, Arizona, Wisconsin, Gonzaga or Duke.
What happens when Kentucky advances deep into the tournament and is down in the Elite Eight or Final Four to, say, a Virginia team that plays defense like there’s six men on the court or a Wisconsin team that has the most efficient offense in the country? Are the young Wildcats (their top-five performers are all underclassman) ready to fight in a tough game after not having been in a situation against a team that knows it can get a win? (That theory operating under the assumption that Texas A&M and LSU only hoped they could win.)
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“Is it better for an undefeated team to lose?” is a constant debate in college basketball and there are compelling arguments for both sides. For this Kentucky team, a loss has to be better. They need to taste defeat. They need to be in a game and know what it feels like to not have everything go their way. Adversity should be welcome and a loss, even to a bad team, would be best for a Wildcats team trying to history. Get a loss in the next three weeks and a title — which should be the ultimate goal — is more likely.
But that’s not what fans want. They have that title banner hanging in Rupp. They’re thirsty for history. So maybe UK gets through the regular season undefeated. Maybe they cruise through the SEC tournament. And, depending on which No. 2 seed gets placed in their region, they’ll be as overwhelming a Final Four candidate as you’ll ever see. But there, in Indianapolis in the opening days of April, is where those easy regular season games might come back to haunt Kentucky and turn a possible 40-0 season into a 38-1 year that fans will forever remember as the 2015 that might have been.
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