Kentucky was favored to advance to the Elite Eight after a string of upsets seemed to open a clear path for John Calipari's 2017-18 team, but the Wildcats fell short in a close loss to Kansas State in Atlanta.
The loss is still fresh so perspective might be tough to muster, but it's officially the offseason for Kentucky basketball.
So how should we judge Kentucky's performance over the season that just past?
Judging Kentucky based on preseason expectations is a bad idea
Kentucky was ranked, once again, in the preseason top 10 of the major polls going into the 2017-18 season. But as usual, those polls are essentially worthless and amount to guesswork that isn't informed by much except previous seasons and what pundits are projecting. For a program like Kentucky, even the most expert of experts are still largely guessing. There are some transcendent high school basketball talents whose games project, with absolute assurance, to a high level in college. But Kentucky didn't have (m)any of those players this year. They did have a lot of players who pundits believed could be good, or really good, but nobody really knew.
So if you're looking at Kentucky towards the top 5 of preseason polls and concluding that a Sweet 16 finish is underachieving, I'd suggest that perhaps John Calipari's team was the "default" top 5/10 choice in the preseason. They're always a safe, even a good pick, because of Calipari's track record, the talent they're guaranteed to have, and also the fact that you really don't look bad if you pick Kentucky to do well and they do less than their usual best.
Judging Kentucky based on their lowest lows in early February produces a more positive perspective, but this view has its weaknesses.
If you go back to early February, Kentucky had lost four consecutive games and there was increasing chatter that the Wildcats might be inching towards the bubble conversation. In hindsight that seems silly. They were a five seed, for goodness sakes. Kentucky was probably never as close to the bubble as some worry warts believed, but the potential for that fall out of the field was real. After all, in context, that was a team that had lost four straight games and had a daunting schedule still to play.
If you choose to take that four game losing streak as your starting point, Thursday's loss and a Sweet 16 finish doesn't seem nearly as disappointing. That makes perfect sense. Of course, what doesn't make perfect sense is why you would set your starting point as early February, since the season begins in November and runs through early April. So while some fans might have been thinking, "The Cats were this close to disaster and an embarrassing season, I'll take 2-1 in the Dance all day," that seems like a little bit of sunshine pumping, because most other teams aren't judged by how they fare in the tournament relative to their worst regular season moments. They're judged based on the tougher to pin down potential they're believed to possess relative to the rest of the teams in play.
Judging Kentucky based on how the team was playing at the end of the season is the closest thing to a clear-eyed perspective yet, but it stops short of some really important information.
Now we're probably getting a little closer to something really good. It makes sense to largely judge a team's tournament performance based on how they were playing at the end of the year because while the tournament is a "second season" (or a third if you count conference tournaments as a second), the games just before the Dance are the best, most concrete proof of where that team is at when it counts.
By that measure, the Sweet 16 isn't a disaster by any stretch of the imagination. ESPN's BPI gave Kentucky all of a 2-percent chance to reach the Final Four when the brackets were released. The so-called "Bracket of Death" had Kentucky facing upset-primed and red-hot Davidson, ultra-talented Arizona and No. 1 overall seed Virginia. If you had told a Kentucky fan before the tournament that their team would make it past the Round of 32, they're probably not thrilled at a Sweet 16 exit but they'd assume a nice feather in their cap from a win over DeAndre Ayton.
Aside from that road loss to Florida in the team's regular season finale, which seems like an outlier in the broader context of real, consistent improvement, Kentucky was probably playing like one of the top 10-15 teams in the country by season's end. They didn't have enough top-top tier wins for a top three seed, but Calipari could rightfully gripe that their draw was probably a little harder than it should have been ... again.
Is the Sweet 16 satisfactory to a fan base that's looking at the Kentucky that trampled Collin Sexton's Crimson Tide and then outlasted a very good Tennessee team in St. Louis? Perhaps.
Judging Kentucky based on how the team should have fared in its bracket as it actually played out is completely fair. However, it should be remembered that college basketball's postseason event is the biggest crapshoot in all of sports and no single-game result, win or loss, should usually change someone's big-picture opinion of whether a season was simply "good" or "bad."
If you told Kentucky fans, on Selection Sunday, they'd reach the Sweet 16, many would be slightly impressed if not completely fulfilled. But if you told them they would face Davidson, Buffalo and Kansas State with 11-seed Cinderella team Loyola on tap, a Sweet 16 would be viewed as quite a bit of a disappointment.
That's understandable. Kentucky was the 5-point favorite on Thursday. On paper, K-State appeared to be the underdog for a number of reasons, not least of which the fact that Kentucky was peaking at the right time and had more talent.
It's worth remembering, however, that 5-point favorites lose every day in college basketball and when it happens during the regular season it's usually not even a semi-interesting news item. It's shrugged off. Kansas State beating Kentucky in a hypothetical SEC-Big XII challenge would have made for one podcast segment on a national show but it would quickly be forgotten and cast aside as "something that happens in this sport." The tournament is no different and in fact, in this year's tournament the crazy has become more common than almost ever before.
Kentucky didn't lose to UMBC. They didn't lose to a 13-seed. They lost to an 8/9 game team that held its own in one of the nation's best conferences and played one of its better games coming off a lackluster Round of 32 performance. It really wasn't much of an upset if you believe Vegas, and you'd better believe Vegas.
That said, asking fans not to look down the road at a potential regional final against an 11-seed with a trip to the national semis on the line is an impossible task. Because so many fans had realized, rightfully, that Kentucky was the odds-on favorite to reach the Final Four, the loss to Kansas State is probably one of the more disappointing defeats of the Calipari era in Lexington. And in a sport that is so defined by its tournament, arguably more than any other sport at any other level, it was a defining game on some level.
UK's loss to KSU, thanks to the unlikely bracket results that preceded Thursday's late game in Atlanta, was for many a missed opportunity for a coveted Final Four bid, even though the teams weren't playing for the Final Four (it's still worth noting that some computer predictor models still only had Kentucky as having a 45 to 55 percent chance of winning the region going into Thursday, so it was far from a given. It was a tossup).
The loss is still fresh so perspective might be tough to muster, but it's officially the offseason for Kentucky basketball.
So how should we judge Kentucky's performance over the season that just past?
Judging Kentucky based on preseason expectations is a bad idea
Kentucky was ranked, once again, in the preseason top 10 of the major polls going into the 2017-18 season. But as usual, those polls are essentially worthless and amount to guesswork that isn't informed by much except previous seasons and what pundits are projecting. For a program like Kentucky, even the most expert of experts are still largely guessing. There are some transcendent high school basketball talents whose games project, with absolute assurance, to a high level in college. But Kentucky didn't have (m)any of those players this year. They did have a lot of players who pundits believed could be good, or really good, but nobody really knew.
So if you're looking at Kentucky towards the top 5 of preseason polls and concluding that a Sweet 16 finish is underachieving, I'd suggest that perhaps John Calipari's team was the "default" top 5/10 choice in the preseason. They're always a safe, even a good pick, because of Calipari's track record, the talent they're guaranteed to have, and also the fact that you really don't look bad if you pick Kentucky to do well and they do less than their usual best.
Judging Kentucky based on their lowest lows in early February produces a more positive perspective, but this view has its weaknesses.
If you go back to early February, Kentucky had lost four consecutive games and there was increasing chatter that the Wildcats might be inching towards the bubble conversation. In hindsight that seems silly. They were a five seed, for goodness sakes. Kentucky was probably never as close to the bubble as some worry warts believed, but the potential for that fall out of the field was real. After all, in context, that was a team that had lost four straight games and had a daunting schedule still to play.
If you choose to take that four game losing streak as your starting point, Thursday's loss and a Sweet 16 finish doesn't seem nearly as disappointing. That makes perfect sense. Of course, what doesn't make perfect sense is why you would set your starting point as early February, since the season begins in November and runs through early April. So while some fans might have been thinking, "The Cats were this close to disaster and an embarrassing season, I'll take 2-1 in the Dance all day," that seems like a little bit of sunshine pumping, because most other teams aren't judged by how they fare in the tournament relative to their worst regular season moments. They're judged based on the tougher to pin down potential they're believed to possess relative to the rest of the teams in play.
Judging Kentucky based on how the team was playing at the end of the season is the closest thing to a clear-eyed perspective yet, but it stops short of some really important information.
Now we're probably getting a little closer to something really good. It makes sense to largely judge a team's tournament performance based on how they were playing at the end of the year because while the tournament is a "second season" (or a third if you count conference tournaments as a second), the games just before the Dance are the best, most concrete proof of where that team is at when it counts.
By that measure, the Sweet 16 isn't a disaster by any stretch of the imagination. ESPN's BPI gave Kentucky all of a 2-percent chance to reach the Final Four when the brackets were released. The so-called "Bracket of Death" had Kentucky facing upset-primed and red-hot Davidson, ultra-talented Arizona and No. 1 overall seed Virginia. If you had told a Kentucky fan before the tournament that their team would make it past the Round of 32, they're probably not thrilled at a Sweet 16 exit but they'd assume a nice feather in their cap from a win over DeAndre Ayton.
Aside from that road loss to Florida in the team's regular season finale, which seems like an outlier in the broader context of real, consistent improvement, Kentucky was probably playing like one of the top 10-15 teams in the country by season's end. They didn't have enough top-top tier wins for a top three seed, but Calipari could rightfully gripe that their draw was probably a little harder than it should have been ... again.
Is the Sweet 16 satisfactory to a fan base that's looking at the Kentucky that trampled Collin Sexton's Crimson Tide and then outlasted a very good Tennessee team in St. Louis? Perhaps.
Judging Kentucky based on how the team should have fared in its bracket as it actually played out is completely fair. However, it should be remembered that college basketball's postseason event is the biggest crapshoot in all of sports and no single-game result, win or loss, should usually change someone's big-picture opinion of whether a season was simply "good" or "bad."
If you told Kentucky fans, on Selection Sunday, they'd reach the Sweet 16, many would be slightly impressed if not completely fulfilled. But if you told them they would face Davidson, Buffalo and Kansas State with 11-seed Cinderella team Loyola on tap, a Sweet 16 would be viewed as quite a bit of a disappointment.
That's understandable. Kentucky was the 5-point favorite on Thursday. On paper, K-State appeared to be the underdog for a number of reasons, not least of which the fact that Kentucky was peaking at the right time and had more talent.
It's worth remembering, however, that 5-point favorites lose every day in college basketball and when it happens during the regular season it's usually not even a semi-interesting news item. It's shrugged off. Kansas State beating Kentucky in a hypothetical SEC-Big XII challenge would have made for one podcast segment on a national show but it would quickly be forgotten and cast aside as "something that happens in this sport." The tournament is no different and in fact, in this year's tournament the crazy has become more common than almost ever before.
Kentucky didn't lose to UMBC. They didn't lose to a 13-seed. They lost to an 8/9 game team that held its own in one of the nation's best conferences and played one of its better games coming off a lackluster Round of 32 performance. It really wasn't much of an upset if you believe Vegas, and you'd better believe Vegas.
That said, asking fans not to look down the road at a potential regional final against an 11-seed with a trip to the national semis on the line is an impossible task. Because so many fans had realized, rightfully, that Kentucky was the odds-on favorite to reach the Final Four, the loss to Kansas State is probably one of the more disappointing defeats of the Calipari era in Lexington. And in a sport that is so defined by its tournament, arguably more than any other sport at any other level, it was a defining game on some level.
UK's loss to KSU, thanks to the unlikely bracket results that preceded Thursday's late game in Atlanta, was for many a missed opportunity for a coveted Final Four bid, even though the teams weren't playing for the Final Four (it's still worth noting that some computer predictor models still only had Kentucky as having a 45 to 55 percent chance of winning the region going into Thursday, so it was far from a given. It was a tossup).
