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John Calipari entered this season under more pressure than ever from Kentucky fans because he A) lost to Saint Peter’s in the first round of the NCAA tournament last March, B) had the worst season in modern Britain two years ago history, C) has not reached a Final Four since 2015, and D) still has just one national title in 13 years in the UK despite regularly enrolling in recruitment courses that rank at the top nationally.
Things are only 12 games worse this season.
“They beat us pretty well,” Calipari said after Wednesday night’s 89-75 loss in Missouri that dropped Kentucky to 8-4 and 40th at the net after ranking No. 1 in KenPom’s preseason rankings .com was.
whoops
More troubling than the 8-4 record is that the Wildcats are 0-4 against the top-45 KenPom teams and just got blown up by a Missouri program that finished 12-21 last season — they were down to 21 in the second half. On that note, shout out to Dennis Gates. The Mizzou first-year coach inherited a chaotic situation but charged via the transfer portal and now has a team that is 12-1 with the only loss coming to Kansas.
Missouri is looking good. Gates seems great.
However, the big national headline is still that Kentucky will go into January with zero wins in the first quadrant and even less identity. Calipari doesn’t have the overwhelming NBA talent he usually has in the UK, nor an obvious understanding of how to maximize the plays in the program. It’s a bad combination that has resulted in a rough start to this season and the removal of the Wildcats from the updated CBS Sports Top 25 and 1 daily college basketball rankings Thursday morning.
Calipari has always had his critics, but the worrying thing for him now is that his biggest critics are die-hard fans of the program he runs, and that has never really been the case for him at the college level since he began his head coaching career before more than three decades.
Is there still time to make things right?
Naturally.
But history tells us that once your own fans turn against you to this extent, it’s difficult to fully win them back, and the fact that KenPom now predicts Kentucky will lose eight more times before Selection Sunday suggests that that Big Blue Nation will probably spend the next three months I grew increasingly dissatisfied with a very expensive coach who is finding it harder than ever to live up to expectations.