Does UK basketball benefit from playing a schedule full of cupcakes

John Calipari likely will not load up his schedule with home-and-home series. (UK Athletics Photo)

I ran across an interesting article recently on Al.com, an online media publication that covers Alabama sports. The article was about Alabama basketball scheduling and how head coach Nate Oats ended up scheduling a home and home series with Gonzaga for the 2021-2022 and 2022-2023 seasons. (By the way Alabama beat No. 1 Gonzaga in Seattle last season to give the Crimson Tide a quality Tier 1 road victory).

The quote in the article that I found most interesting was this one.  “I don’t shy away from playing big games. I’d rather play a bunch of big games than a bunch of guaranteed wins. So, let’s go for it. It worked out well, we got the win and now they (Gonzaga) have to return it,” Oats said.

I thought that was an interesting philosophy as compared to the one UK coach John Calipari generally embraces. Calipari likes playing big games but he also has a big sweet tooth, as in cupcakes on the home schedule.

UK has several big games on the schedule this year including Michigan State at the State Farm Champions Classic in Indianapolis, Michigan in the Basketball Hall of Fame Showcase in London and UCLA along with reigning national champion Kansas. But none of those games are part of a home and home series.

The only non-conference quality home and home series Kentucky had was with Notre Dame, but after two consecutive UK losses the third and final game has now been pushed out to 2023-2024 and will be at a neutral site. By the way, Notre Dame was replaced on the UK schedule with Duquesne, a team that won only six games last season and finished last in the A-10 conference with a 1-16 record. Not exactly a marquee matchup for UK fans to enjoy but it should satisfy Calipari’s sweet tooth with plenty of icing piled on top.

That means of the quality non-conference games on the 2022-2023 schedule only Kansas will be played in Rupp Arena, as part of the Big 12/SEC Challenge, not as part of a home and home series.

Last season UK’s schedule had plenty of difficult games but unfortunately the bulk of the non-conference schedule was pure sugar. The murderer’s row of home games last season included such notable foes as Robert Morris, Mount St. Mary’s, Ohio, Albany, North Florida, Central Michigan, Southern University and High Point.  That’s eight of the nine non-conference home games on the schedule.

On the flip side Alabama had the No. 1 most difficult schedule in the country heading into the preseason last year with a home and home series with the aforementioned No. 1 Gonzaga, Memphis and No. 14 Houston. Even the cupcakes were teams like 30-5 South Dakota State and 27-7 Davidson.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that Kentucky ever plays an easy schedule (UK’s was ranked in the low 20s last year) but I do think that Calipari should embrace more difficult home and home series with name schools and not keep playing a handful of neutral site tournament games to go with his baker’s delight home schedule.

Basketball fans spend a lot of money, time and effort to attend home games at Rupp Arena and should be rewarded accordingly; and now that Calipari is recruiting more and more experienced players out of the transfer portal there is no need to load up a dozen creme-filled chocolate swirls when his team could easily be playing a schedule that included some of the top teams in lesser conferences like a South Dakota State or a Davidson.

It seems that with a home and home series made up of some of the better teams of say, the Big 10, Big East, A-10 or ACC, fans would benefit by seeing UK play some quality teams at home and the players would benefit from the added difficulty of beating teams that are not physically outmatched from the git-go.

For me it appears that this continuing diet of sweet treats at home seems to be more related to fear than anything else. Here’s what I mean. In 2020-2021 Kentucky had a roster that was dominated by inexperienced, highly rated freshmen and Calipari created a non-conference schedule that included some experienced and difficult teams. The Wildcats proceeded to go 1-6 over their first 7 games and never recovered.

At the time Calipari blamed himself for the losses saying, “You gotta play games you can win to build confidence.”

Losing six of those first seven games set the tone for the whole year and that team went on to have a historically bad season. Since then it doesn’t appear that Calipari wants to ever again have any part of that type scheduling.

Mark Twain once said, “If a cat sits on a hot stove, that cat won’t sit on a hot stove again. That cat won’t sit on a cold stove either. That cat just don’t like stoves.”

I think that pretty well sums up the scheduling philosophy for UK Basketball. After a 9-16 finish in 2020 Calipari just doesn’t like stoves. At least not at home.