One of the unusual aspects about coaching or playing men's basketball at Kentucky is that how the Wildcats fare in conference games is not what sets the mood of UK fans toward their team.
When, like UK, you have won 48 regular-season Southeastern Conference titles and 31 SEC Tournament championships, your fan base takes those achievements as a given.
At Kentucky, it is how the Cats fare against UK's peer group of college hoops blue bloods _ Duke, Indiana, Kansas, Louisville, North Carolina and UCLA _ that sets the temperature in the Big Blue Nation.
The bad news for Coach John Calipari's 2018-19 Wildcats (8-2) is they began this season absorbing a 118-84 bludgeoning from Duke that took a lot of steam out of the BBN.
The good news is that the next two Kentucky games, against North Carolina on Saturday in the CBS Sports Classic in Chicago and at Louisville on Dec. 27, are versus the two "peer-group rivals" that UK has had the most success against under Calipari.
With those two blue-blood battles dead ahead, it seems an opportune time to run some "rivalry diagnostics" and see how UK stands against its peers among the historically elite of college hoops:
