Four months ago, the notion would have been man-bites-bulldog crazy: Kentucky, ranked first in the nation and the possessor of seven McDonald’s All-Americans, and Georgia, ranked 11th in the 14-team SEC after bidding farewell to the only McDonald’s man the program had known in two decades, entering the SEC tournament as peers. Yet that’s how they finished in the regular-season standings, each 12-6 but only one happy about it.
When it comes to hoops, the two have nothing in common. Not so long ago, Kentucky coach John Calipari proclaimed: “We are college basketball.” A lot of folks who call themselves Georgia fans barely acknowledge the existence of college basketball. The Wildcats draw bigger crowds in hotel lobbies than the Bulldogs do for some home games. Should the two meet in the semis Saturday, the gathering in the, er, Georgia Dome will surely be 10-1 Big Blue.
Which isn’t to say Georgia couldn’t win such a game. Kentucky has taken its collection of heralded recruits and looked exactly like that — a collection, as opposed to a functioning team. Georgia has maximized the modest talents of the guys who mostly watched Kentavious Caldwell-Pope do his solo act last season.
It would be wrong to suggest that Calipari does his coaching only on national signing days. Kentucky’s 2012 NCAA championship team was among the greatest working units in the history of the sport, and such harmony never comes without oversight. Nor can Georgia’s rise to 12-6 in SEC play be laid solely at Mark Fox’s feet. He’s a splendid tactician, but the Bulldogs themselves — from Kenny Gaines to Charles Mann to Marcus Thornton to Nemanja Djurisic — had to do the playing.
Still, the contrast is unavoidable. The Bulldogs have allowed themselves to be coached up; the Wildcats don’t appear to have been coached much at all. The Bulldogs spread the court and let Gaines and Mann drive the lane, the upshot being that they took more free throws than any other SEC team in conference play. Georgia also led the league in defensive field-goal percentage, which is tough to do if you lack a shot-blocker, and finished third in rebounding margin, which is nice work from a team that lacks a post presence. (The Bulldogs start three mid-sized forwards.)
Still at issue: Are the Bulldogs as good as their SEC record, or is that record a function of the SEC being tepid if not terrible? How could the same team that was 6-6 in non-conference play (with a nine-point home loss to Georgia Tech, which went 6-12 in the ACC) fare so much better after New Year’s Day? Did Georgia figure things out? Or did the rest of the conference — excluding Florida, which is the nation’s best team — figure out nothing?
As strange as Georgia’s season has been, the strangest part is that Bulldogs enter the SEC tournament not yet on the NCAA bubble. Their RPI of 75 is roughly 20 spots too low for viable at-large consideration and places them only seventh among the 14 SEC teams. Indeed, Georgia’s RPI lags that of Missouri and LSU, each of which it swept home-and-home. The Bulldogs are 0-6 against teams with an RPI of 50 or better, the average margin of those six losses being 17.7 points.
If you’re grading on expectations, you’d give Georgia a B-plus on its season and Kentucky a D-minus. The difference is that Kentucky can lose its first game in this tournament and still make the Big Dance, while Georgia has to win the thing to be sure. Are the Bulldogs capable of such a run? Ordinarily you’d say no, given that the bracket places them on the same side as the gifted Wildcats and that the nation’s No. 1 team is apt to be waiting in the finals, but — stop me if you’ve heard this before — strange things can happen in conference tournaments, this one especially.
What if LSU, which beat Kentucky once and nearly twice, ousts the Wildcats in the quarterfinals? What if Tennessee, which has won its past three games by an aggregate 93 points, upsets Florida, which has nothing to prove this weekend, in the semis? What if everything breaks right for the Bulldogs, who in a tornado-tossed week in 2008 won the strangest conference tournament ever?
Those Bulldogs — coached by Dennis Felton, who would be fired 10 months latter — had to win four games, with the storm and its resulting change of venue forcing them to win the final three in the space of 29 hours. This Georgia team would need only to win three games in 45 hours. Comparatively speaking, that would seem a piece of cake.
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