As Kentucky fan frustration has mounted in what has become a UK men’s basketball season of discontent, one often hears a variation on the same theme:
That the UK basketball program is in danger of becoming “the next Indiana.”
For college hoops followers in the commonwealth, Indiana Hoosiers men’s basketball serves as a cautionary tale of how a once-elite program can descend into a sustained mediocrity.
Are such fears for the UK program justified?
With five NCAA championships and eight Final Fours on its résumé, Indiana has the pedigree of a college hoops blue blood. The Hoosiers also have a large, intense and basketball-centric fan base.
In the heyday of the Bob Knight coaching era, Indiana played in five Final Fours between 1973 and 1992 and won three national titles between 1976 and 1987. At that time, Indiana was firmly ensconced with schools such as North Carolina and Kentucky among the elite of men’s college hoops.
However, Knight’s erratic personal comportment and authoritarian coaching style combined to undermine Indiana basketball in the latter stages of the IU icon’s coaching career. Over Knight’s final seven seasons on the Indiana bench (1993-2000), the Hoosiers never lost fewer than nine games in a year and suffered double-digit defeats in five of seven campaigns.
Once the Indiana University administration finally grew weary of Knight’s off-the-court behavioral issues and cut the coach loose, IU basketball has never really been able to build a new brand identity. What has subsequently happened to Indiana basketball is a dramatic descent from elite status that the school has been unable to halt.
Since 1994-95, Indiana has produced a whopping 23 seasons with double-digit losses. In all that time, IU has never lost fewer than seven games in a season. For my money, current Indiana head man Mike Woodson is doing a quality job with the Hoosiers program — yet he had 14 defeats (21-14) last season and already has seven (18-7) this year.
Over the past 29 years, the Hoosiers have had the same number of losing seasons, five, as they have had single-loss seasons.
Indiana has not reached a Final Four nor even played in an NCAA Tournament Elite Eight since 2002. Over the past six years, IU has played in the NCAA tourney one time — last season.
Meanwhile, there are obvious signs of program decline at Kentucky.
Over the five seasons prior to the current one, UK has won the SEC regular-season title (2019-20) and the SEC Tournament championship (2017-18) only one time each.
Since the final week of the 2019-20 season, Kentucky is 35-31 against other power-conference foes (and is 35-32 if you want to include Gonzaga among the high-major opponents).
From the start of the 2020-21 season until now, UK is 5-15 in its last 20 games against teams ranked in the AP Top 25.
Kentucky last won an NCAA Tournament game on March 29, 2019, and hasn’t played in the SEC Tournament finals since March 11, 2018.
Over the past three seasons, UK 1.) has produced the worst season (9-16 in 2020-21) in its modern hoops history; 2.) suffered the worst NCAA Tournament loss by seeding (to No. 15 seed Saint Peters in the 2022 Big Dance) in its entire basketball history; 3.) and is sitting squarely on the NCAA tourney bubble with a 16-9 record as the 2022-23 regular season rapidly approaches its close.
Because UK would owe John Calipari in the neighborhood of a $40 million contract buyout if it tried to remove its coach without cause after this season, Kentucky remains wedded to its current head man. So unless Calipari chooses to leave on his own, he’s going to be the Wildcats’ coach for the foreseeable future.
Whatever their personal feelings toward each other, both Calipari and the University of Kentucky administration that signed the coach in 2019 to the 10-year contract extension that features such elevated buyout numbers should have ample incentive to work together to ensure that the coach’s pact does not end up looking like a colossal mistake that becomes a blot on legacies.
So barring a dramatic turnaround that produces unexpectedly-deep tournament runs for Kentucky in 2023, the UK brain trust and Calipari need to conduct a thorough off-season review of a program that is not living up to the exacting standards set by the Wildcats’ regal hoops past and then figure out how to get the problems fixed.
As for comparing UK to IU, the Wildcats played in an NCAA Tournament Elite Eight as recently as 2019 and were in the Final Four as recently as 2015. So the claims that Kentucky’s present decline is anywhere close to what Indiana has suffered are overwrought.
It is not an overblown concern, however, to fret that Kentucky has taken some steps down “the Indiana path.” Suffice to say, it behooves UK basketball to find a detour out of that particular journey as quickly as possible.
