Kentucky’s Perfect Dream: Is 40-0 Really Attainable?
Posted by Bennet Hayes on December 30th, 2014On days like last Saturday, they tell you to throw out the records. Rivalry games like Kentucky-Louisville are supposed to occur in a vacuum, a place where bragging rights supersede any other consideration. At leas that’s how the thinking goes. It’s a quaint notion, indeed, but this latest installment of the Bluegrass State rivalry turned out to be all about the records. To be more specific, Kentucky’s record. With all due respect to Louisville’s previously unblemished loss tally – and even more respect to a stacked ACC – the Cardinals were never going to chase a perfect season, even if they had found a way to take down the Wildcats. But for Kentucky, with its stiffest test now in the rear-view and the zero in its loss column unchanged, dreams of an undefeated season have begun to transition out of fantasy and into reality. It was all anyone wanted to talk about after the game: Is 40-0 really possible?
The Young Wildcats Have Had Plenty Of Fun So Far; Are They Capable Of Crafting College Basketball’s First Perfect Season Since 1976?
It is hard to look at the Kentucky schedule and find a single remaining game that it is likely to lose. This much is true. Using KenPom as our basis, the Wildcats are predicted to have at least an 89 percent chance of winning in 15 of their 18 SEC games. The three exceptions are visits to South Carolina on January 24 (84% win share), Florida on February 7 (77% win share), and Georgia on March 3 (84% win share). Florida’s best win this season is over Yale; the Gamecocks have beaten only one team in KenPom’s top 125 (Oklahoma State); and Georgia has two top-70 wins (Seton Hall and Colorado). Do we really expect any of these teams to prove capable of toppling one of the most dominant college basketball teams of the 21st century? I don’t think so.
Getting through the SEC unscathed – conference tournament included — is definitely possible for the ‘Cats. But is it likely? As difficult as it is to look down the schedule and find an SEC foe capable of beating them, winning 21 straight games against major conference teams is not as easy a task as many are suggesting. Even KenPom gives Kentucky just a 24.3 percent chance of ripping off the next 18 in a row. Avoiding a road trip to Arkansas on the schedule this year helps the cause, but won’t there be a night – most likely away from Rupp Arena — where the shots just aren’t falling for Coach Cal’s young bunch? They are shooting just 32.1 percent from three-point range and 66.2 percent from the line; imagining a 40-minute offensive drought is not too difficult, particularly in a foreign environment. Of course, you could use those same percentages to make a different but equally compelling point. Kentucky has been utterly dominant to this point, despite those inefficiencies — why even worry about them?
We already know that Kentucky’s defense is good enough to overcome a miserable shooting night. Its current defensive efficiency rating of 82.1 is significantly lower than both the natonal-best 88.5 at Arizona last year and Calipari’s own 85.1 at Memphis’ in 2009 (the best of the 12-season KenPom era). But even if Kentucky uses that historically stout defense to overwhelm a sputtering SEC and race into the NCAA Tournament at 34-0, the toughest segment of the perfect season will have yet to be completed. In this scenario, the Wildcats will clearly be the #1 overall seed and an overwhelming favorite to win it all, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t several teams in the field capable of defeating them. Duke is 11-0 and would be a comfortable title favorite of its own in almost any other recent season. Arizona and Wisconsin both have frontcourts fully capable of battling the Kentucky bigs, while Louisville and Virginia have already proven they can defend as well as any team not named Kentucky. Gonzaga’s explosive offense could also make for an interesting solution to the Wildcats’ puzzle. More so than any other year in recent memory, college basketball has a handful of legitimately elite teams. It’s foolish to expect Kentucky to present a simple six-game demolition of them for their final exam.
Many, many Wichita State comparisons will be made as long as the Wildcats remain unbeaten. The Shockers successfully navigated a perfect road to the NCAA Tournament just last season, so yes – they can stand as a corollary. Fair. But the Missouri Valley is not the SEC (not even this year’s SEC) and last season’s foreign-feeling media buzz in Wichita already feels right at home in Lexington. If any program was built to handle all the distractions that accompany a crack at perfection, it’s Kentucky. If any coach is capable of keeping a group of teenagers focused on the task at hand while they chase history, it’s John Calipari. The infrastructure is arranged — as well it possibly can be — to make 40-0 happen. It’s just that perfect seasons are kind of hard to do. It was only a few weeks ago that Columbia held a lead on the Wildcats with 13 minutes to play in Rupp Arena. Loyola (MD), the 308th best team in the country, defeated the Lions in their own gymnasium earlier this season. Weird stuff happens in college basketball – we’ve already seen it over and over again this season. Heck, just check out Sunday’s results, when Stony Brook won at Washington and Cal State Bakersfield upended Cal.
Before Saturday’s game, if you wanted to review Kentucky’s schedule and point out a future loss, you could. That date with the Cardinals allowed for it. Such an exercise is now impossible, but don’t misinterpret a clear course as an easy one. There will always be that brutal six-game test against the nation’s best teams waiting before the finish line and the 21 other pre-Tournament games awaiting the Wildcats shouldn’t be overlooked either. In the next two-and-a-half months, seven top-100 teams will host Kentucky. My guess? On one of those nights, a raucous home crowd will matter. Kentucky will go 2-of-15 from three-point range, miss half their free throws, and an SEC team fighting for a spot in the NCAA Tournament will hit enough big-time shots to disrupt history. Kentucky has exhibited their dominance all season long, but college basketball has demonstrated its wackiness in equally strong doses. At some point — long before 40-0 — expect those two trends to converge.
Ky swept regular conference play (16-0) 3 times already ’96, ’03 & ’12. You must only be a sophomore at Fla. GO CATS!
“the Missouri Valley is not the SEC”
Which way did you mean that? Did you mean that the SEC teams are stronger, even in this horrible year, or did you mean that the MVC has venues where being the home team has an even stronger advantage than normal? Both are correct. The MVC is a basketball conference, where people actually care about hoops and there is a serious home court edge.
That’s been kind of a shock to the Big East to find out that the instant Creighton switched to their league, they had the best home court advantage in the conference.