No one has seemed more at home in the Georgia Dome over the years than Kentucky’s basketball team.
Not even the Falcons.
Kentucky has compiled a 24-5 record in the Dome, including 18-4 in SEC tournament games and 4-0 in NCAA tournament games.
This seems like a pretty good place for the Wildcats to land right about now.
Picked to win the SEC regular-season championship, they finished a distant six games behind Florida. Ranked No. 1 in the nation in preseason, they finished the regular season unranked, the first team in 34 years to make such a drop in the Associated Press basketball poll.
Still, the Wildcats are the No. 2 seed in the SEC tournament. After a double-bye into the quarterfinals, they will open Friday night against the winner of Thursday night’s Alabama-LSU game.
“We’ve got to get our mojo back,” Kentucky coach John Calipari said earlier this week, more than once.
The Wildcats (22-9, 12-6 SEC) clearly lost their mojo in the final two weeks of the regular season, losing three of their last four games. They lost to Arkansas in overtime at Rupp Arena, lost by five points at South Carolina and lost by 19 at now-No. 1 Florida in the regular-season finale.
“Two weeks ago we were looking pretty good, and right now we’re not,” Calipari said. “So we gotta get it back.”
Once again, Kentucky has a freshman-dominated team. In fact, all five starters have been freshmen in eight of the Wildcats’ past 10 games. Heading the group is forward Julius Randle, the fifth consecutive Kentucky player to be named SEC freshman of the year. Randle is the Wildcats’ leading scorer (14.4 points per game) and rebounder (10.5 per game).
“He’s a dominating player,” Texas A&M coach Billy Kennedy said. “He understands sense of urgency.”
Collectively, though, Kentucky’s play this season — particularly its 1-5 record against ranked opponents — has put into perspective the difficulty and improbability of what the Wildcats did two years ago, when they won the NCAA championship with a freshmen-dominated team.
“You take the name off the jerseys, and this team has been really ordinary, at least by Kentucky standards,” ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi said on a conference call this week. “And they’re allowed to be just regular good instead of a borderline NBA team.
“I think my lesson with Kentucky this year is that what happened two years ago … was the exception,” Lunardi said. “Maybe this whole idea of building a (new) team every year with all-stars and winning a national championship is a little harder than we thought.”
Calipari, though, is undeterred.
He said he made Kentucky’s practices more physical this week because “the games have gotten more and more physical” as the season has progressed despite the NCAA’s preseason decree that play would be officiated more tightly.
He also alluded to a mysterious “tweak” to the offense that he feels will prove significant in the Wildcats’ performance and confidence.
But the pivotal factor, he said, remains that his young players must rally and respond in the inevitable moments of adversity during games.
“I think these kids understand that they’re going to have to do this together, they’re going to have to come together as a group,” Calpari said. “And, you know, it’s time to do it.”
Time and place.
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