LEXINGTON, Ky. _ Matt Haarms is not the first giant standing 7-foot-3 or taller to unexpectedly spurn Kentucky in recruiting.
The Purdue graduate transfer stunned the college basketball world Thursday by saying no to John Calipari and yes to BYU _ coached by ex-UK big man Mark Pope.
This past year has featured quite a run for former UK players from the mid-1990s scoring shocking victories over their alma mater.
Walter McCarty coached Evansville to an unthinkable win over Kentucky in Rupp Arena in November. Now, Pope and BYU have bested the Wildcats for the most ardently pursued big man on the grad transfer market.
UK's basketball history with 7-footers is complicated. All-time, UK has had only nine such players _ and Kentucky has now lost out on three unusually tall centers under unusual circumstances.
In his 41 seasons (1930-1972) on the UK bench, Adolph Rupp coached only two 7-footers.
The first, Bill Spivey (7-foot, 230 pounds), was the star of Kentucky's 1951 NCAA Tournament championship team. Over his 63-game UK career, Spivey averaged 19.3 points.
Rupp's second 7-footer, Tom Payne (7-2, 235 pounds), was also the first black men's basketball player who accepted a scholarship offer from Kentucky.
In his one UK varsity season (1970-71) before entering the old NBA "hardship draft," Payne averaged a double-double, 16.9 points and 10.1 rebounds.
During Joe B. Hall's coaching tenure (1972-85), Kentucky had only one 7-footer make it to the court.
Sam Bowie (7-1, 230) missed two full seasons of his Wildcats career (1979-84) due to leg injuries, but still rendered impressive career numbers with 1,285 points, 843 rebounds and 218 blocked shots.
Under Eddie Sutton (1985-89) and Rick Pitino (1989-97), Kentucky never had a 7-footer.
In Tubby Smith's reign (1997-2007) as top Cat, the coach had a proclivity for developmental big men.
Smith's 2005-06 team had to look fearsome walking through airports. It featured three 7-footers _ Shagari Alleyne (7-3, 271), Jared Carter (7-2, 277) and Lukasz Obrzut (7-1, 265).
On the court, however, not one of Obrzut (196), Alleyne (138) or Carter (40) reached 200 career points at UK.
So far, Kentucky has had three 7-footers under Calipari (2009-present).
Willie Cauley-Stein (7-foot, 240) was a rare three-year player (2012-2015) in UK's one-and-done era _ and a good one. Cauley-Stein was one of the stars on UK's 38-1 team in 2014-15 and finished his Kentucky career with 843 points, 655 rebounds and 115 blocked shots.
Dakari Johnson (7-foot, 255) played on two Final Four teams (2014 and 2015) in his two-season Kentucky stint. The Brooklyn, N.Y., product scored 450 points and grabbed 334 rebounds in Wildcats blue.
Isaac Humprhies (7-foot, 260) also played two seasons (2015-17) at Kentucky, and had some memorable games. The Sydney, Australia, product went for six points and 12 rebounds at Texas A&M in 2015-16. Humphries had 12 points and five rebounds in 21 minutes vs. North Carolina in the 2017 NCAA Tournament round of eight.
Yet for his two-year UK career, Humphries had only 148 points and 162 rebounds.
Rather than becoming Kentucky's 10th all-time 7-footer, the 7-3 Haarms will join 7-foot-4 centers Ralph Sampson and Gunther Behnke on the list of big men that UK expected to add but didn't.
In 1979, Kentucky was so sure it was going to add Sampson to a ballyhooed recruiting class that already included Bowie that Lexington media outlets traveled to Harrisonburg, Va., to cover the center's signing announcement.
When it came time for Sampson to announce, the big man spoke haltingly. "The last couple days I didn't know what to do," he said. "You know, I changed my mind at least 50 times. It came down to Kentucky and Virginia. So, I think I'm going with Virginia."
Five years later, Kentucky fleetingly had a 7-4 player on campus for the fall semester in 1984-85.
The prior summer, then-Wildcats players Kenny Walker and James Blackmon had played internationally for the U.S. in a tournament in Mallorca, Spain. Team USA ran up against a German team that featured a mammoth post player.
That 7-4 center, Gunther Behnke, scored 29 points and claimed 15 rebounds as the Germans upset Team USA.
"Gunther was a problem (to play against)," Walker recalled Wednesday. "He was a pretty-skilled guy. He could get up and down the court. He was not your typical 7-footer."
Walker and Blackmon came back to Lexington raving about Behnke and imploring the UK coaching staff to recruit him.
Hall successfully did just that.
Yet when Behnke came to Lexington to start school, he lasted exactly five days.
"(Behnke) wouldn't leave his high school girlfriend," Hall told me in 2015. "When we recruited him, his father promised me he would stay (at UK), that he wouldn't let him leave. But Gunther called his Dad every day for five days. On the fifth day, the father called me and said, 'I know what I said, but I'm going to let him come home.' "
Haarms would not have been a program changer for Kentucky. In his three-year Purdue career, Haarms started 40 of 102 games and averaged 7.5 points, 4.4 rebounds and 2.1 blocked shots.
For a 2020-21 UK roster that has a glaring hole at center, however, Haarms would have plugged a hole.
Instead, he joins Sampson and Behnke on the list of giants who slipped from Kentucky's grasp.
