Kentucky had no answers for Alabama and still does not have a Quad 1 win this season. (Vicky Graff Photo)
Alabama students had a lot of fun chanting “NIT” at Kentucky while the Crimson Tide was dismantling the Wildcats 78-52 Saturday.
Alabama coach Nate Oats, who is not overly friendly with Kentucky coach John Calipari, tried to downplay the chant after the one-sided Alabama win.
“Kentucky’s not going to go to the NIT,” Oats said. “They’re an NCAA Tournament team.
“It’s just college students being college students. They’ve got plenty of talent over there. They’ve got really good players. They just didn’t shoot the ball well tonight. They’ll get their stuff figured out.”
But will they? Why think this Kentucky team that also got blistered at Missouri is going to suddenly get rolling?
The Cats are 10-5 overall and already 1-2 in SEC play. Kentucky does not have a win yet that would merit UK being in the NCAA Tournament. Kentucky is 0-4 in Quad 1 games with the best wins in the NET rankings over No. 73 Michigan, No. 76 Yales and No. 78 LSU — and none of those were easy wins.
Kentucky has played four top 50 NET teams away from Rupp Arena and trailed by at least 12 points in all four games and got beat badly by Gonzaga, Missouri and Alabama. Kentucky led for only 17 seconds at Alabama, 39 seconds at Gonzaga and 69 seconds at Gonzaga. In the neutral site loss to UCLA, Kentucky had the lead for just over four minutes.
The loss at Alabama was the third-worst loss of the Calipari era at Kentucky and the biggest loss ever to Alabama.
Senior point guard Sahvir Wheeler said there is no need for panic — but what else could he say Saturday.
“It’s a long season,” Wheeler said.
It is but the worry is this is going to be a lot longer season than anyone anticipated because of mounting losses.
However, Wheeler still believes — or says he does.
“Let’s say we win out, only lose two league games. You still gonna ask me that question at the end of the year? Probably not,” Wheeler said about this being time to panic.
Calipari has sort of a similar approach in trying to remain optimistic.
“Gotta regroup,” Calipari said after Saturday’s loss. “We are better than we played, and I told them after: Most of the time, you’re not as good as you think and not as bad as you think. Let’s just hope we’re not as bad as we looked today.”
Calipari remembered Kentucky going to Kansas last January and winning by 18 points. A few months later Kansas won the national championship.
“It’s a long season. Let’s learn from this and let’s get this right,” Calipari said.
Sounds good but doing it based on what this team is shown is going to be awfully, awfully hard.
2 Responses
Who cares what Nate Oats says about UK?
UK at St Peters in the first round of the NIT would be very fitting.
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