LEXINGTON, Ky. — Admit it, you didn't think it could happen.
Not at Kentucky. Not in college basketball. Not here, not now, not ever. Not when it didn't happen in the brief but ruinous reign of Billy Gillispie, or during the much-maligned final seasons of Tubby Smith or even in Rick Pitino's first season as UK coach, when a rag-tag crew held together with duct tape still went 10-8 in the SEC.
This year, with the nation's No. 1 recruiting class, plus a coveted 7-foot all-conference transfer and a graduate transfer who had started for a top-25 program, Kentucky clinched a losing record in the SEC with its 70-62 loss at Ole Miss on Tuesday night.
With one regular-season game remaining, the Cats are 7-9 in league play. You have to go back to 1988-89 and Eddie Sutton's final season, a brutal one — 8-10 in the league, 13-19 overall — played under a heavy black cloud of an NCAA investigation, to find the last time the program with 52 conference titles to its credit failed to post a winning record in the SEC.
"I'm not used to this," said John Calipari during Tuesday's postgame videoconference, and indeed Calipari was a 29-year-old coach when he went 10-19 in his first season running the show at UMass, his only losing campaign as a college head coach.
But hey, we're not used to this around here, either. Even in a once-in-a-century pandemic with unprecedented consequences and COVID-19 restrictions, it's hard to truly grasp how unexpectedly bad this Kentucky basketball season has been.
UK is 8-15, for heaven's sakes. In basketball. Think of it, 8-15. Even if you add five or six victories from the usual early-season guarantee games played in a normal season, the record would be 14-15. And even if you say that a normal summer and regular preseason would have turned a couple of those losses into wins, we're talking 16-13 or 17-12. Maybe. At best.
Alabama is the SEC's new king. The Crimson Tide cut down the Coleman Coliseum nets Tuesday night after beating archrival Auburn, 70-58, to capture the regular-season title outright. Arkansas is the league's hottest team. The Razorbacks routed South Carolina 101-73 on Tuesday for their 10th straight conference win.
Both the Tide and the Razorbacks play an uptempo brand of basketball under respective coaches Nate Oats and Eric Musselman. Alabama has scored 100-or-more points twice this season; Arkansas three times. Kentucky hasn't scored 100 points in a game since Nov. 26, 2017; 100 points in a conference game since Jan. 3, 2017.
But for UK, the disturbing part of the loss in Oxford wasn't that Kentucky failed to score 70 points for the 12th time this season, or that it shot 37.5% from the floor or made just five of 20 3-point attempts. We've come to expect that. The disturbing part was that Ole Miss just wanted the game more.
The Rebels pounded the Cats on the glass, 42-28. And coaches will tell you that rebounding is as much effort as technique, with a healthy dose of want-to. Adding to that, Ole Miss was 16 of 19 at the foul line for 84.2%. Kentucky, a team that entered the night making 74% of its free throws, made just 15 of 25 for 60%. That's the mark of an unfocused team.
Afterward, Calipari said what's most disappointing to him is that "we were right on the edge" of doing "some crazy stuff" and then "they revert." I admit I fell for it, too. I thought UK's recent three-game win streak was a turning point, that the light bulb had finally been illuminated and that the Cats were on a roll. This is Kentucky basketball, after all.
Turns out, it's not the Kentucky basketball we're used to, not by a long (missed) shot. Not in the days of Billy G or Tubby or even early Ricky P. We didn't think it could happen, that Kentucky could be 8-15, not under John Calipari, but happened it has.
