There’s a reason the last undefeated NCAA champion was Indiana in 1976: Going unbeaten is hard. There’s also a reason the past three teams to enter the Big Dance without a loss — Indiana State in 1979, UNLV in 1991 and Wichita State last season — hailed from lesser leagues: Going unbeaten while based in a major conference is all but undoable.
That Kentucky is almost three-quarters of the way to 40-0 tells us the Wildcats are, duh, really good. But it takes only one off-night to be unbeaten no more. That off-night might arrive in the Big Dance, where pressure unnerved unbeaten Vegas against Duke in 1991. It might come in the SEC tournament next week. But the best chance for Kentucky to lose could come Tuesday in, of all unassuming places, Georgia’s Stegeman Coliseum.
Beyond this week, everything will involve a neutral court, and for Kentucky there’s rarely such a thing. The Wildcats will have the most fans in Nashville for the SEC, in Louisville for the NCAA’s first weekend, in Cleveland for the regional and at the Final Four in Indianapolis. (Four tournament sites, the most distant in a state that borders the Bluegrass.) Even if 3,000 Big Blue supporters slip into Stegeman, they’ll still be outnumbered.
Georgia fans are renowned, if that’s the word, for their avoidance of basketball, but the old barn should be jumping tonight. There was little chance these Wildcats would lose in Rupp Arena (and they haven’t yet), but no team is quite as good on the road. This will be Kentucky’s last road game.
Owing to the SEC’s misshapen schedule, it’s hard to draw much from home/road splits, but there’s this: Of the five other league teams apt to make the NCAA field, Kentucky has played only Texas A&M and LSU away from Rupp. Those were two of the Wildcats’ three real scares. (The other was against Ole Miss, which took them to overtime Jan. 6.)
Georgia visited Rupp on Feb. 3 without leading scorer/rebounder Marcus Thornton. The Wildcats led by five points inside the final two minutes before winning by 11. The Bulldogs saw Kentucky’s two platoons of NBA-ready bodies and hung tough, and they did it on the road. They have reason to believe they can do as well if not better in Athens.
Manpower-wise, this is no contest, but the college game isn’t always a test of talent. Georgia has good guards and plays at a measured pace. A team that tries to run with Kentucky becomes a shredded tire. (Full-tilt Arkansas trailed by 31 with eight minutes left Saturday.) Provided Georgia can make enough jump shots — driving against the towering Wildcats is a fool’s errand — this can be a 40-minute game. Kentucky hasn’t had one of those since its escape from Baton Rouge three weeks ago.
The second-greatest debate among Kentucky watchers is whether this team is as splendid as the 2012 NCAA champ, which went 38-2 and produced the first and second selections in the NBA draft. I lean toward the earlier group because of Anthony Davis, who at 21 has become the world’s best player, but here we note: As great as those Wildcats were, they still lost twice. If that bunch could lose, so can this.
Which brings us to the greater debate: If you’re Kentucky, do you want to lose? The 2012 team profited from its SEC final loss to Vanderbilt, just as the 1996 Wildcats — another two-loss NCAA champ — were refocused by a similar wobble against Mississippi State. But these Wildcats are 29-0, which is something Kentucky has never been.
Being Kentucky in 2015 has become, at least for the moment, bigger than being the best team of 2015. It’s now about being the first undefeated champion since Indiana, and we tend to forget that the Hoosiers of 1976 were playing a mulligan. Indiana fans believe to this day that the ‘75 team was better, but it ran afoul of an impassioned opponent in the Mideast Regional final and saw 31-0 go bust.
That opponent was Kentucky, which had lost by 24 points to the Hoosiers 3 1/2 months earlier. As the calendar turns to March, we wait to see if the Kentucky of 2015 can avoid the Kentucky of 1975.
