[Cactus Jack]

Kentucky means just as much now as it ever has.

This year's chalk Final Four seemed to be pretty indicative of the top schools being able to get the best talent through NIL and the transfer portal.


These two statements conflict each other, and also make my point. 

How do they conflict?

There's no Loyola Chicago, George Mason, or VCU. It was all #1 seeds, all power conferences, and all well funded programs, most of which had beaten most of the highest seeds possible (which also happened to be well funded teams from big conferences) on their path there.

Florida --> #3 Texas Tech --> #4 Maryland --> #8 UConn
Houston --> #2 Tennessee --> #4 Purdue --> #8 Gonzaga
Auburn --> #2 Michigan St. --> #5 Michigan --> #9 Creighton
Duke --> #2 Alabama --> #4 Arizona --> #9 Baylor

Look at the Elite Eight-- four SEC schools, two Big XII, one Big Ten, and one ACC school. All of those schools but Tennessee have recently been to a Final Four or better. Expand that to Sweet 16 and you'd add Kentucky, Arkansas, Ole Miss, and BYU-- three SEC and another Big XII school. All well funded and the upstart (Ole Miss) and reboot (Arkansas) hired coaches who've coached in the national championship game. BYU had their coach hired away by Kentucky, replaced him with someone from the NBA, have very deep pockets, and a fair amount of recent success.

It's going to be hard for a UMBC, Florida Gulf Coast, or St. Peter's to become the next Gonzaga with the way the transfer portal is set up-- one successful year (or two at most) and their coach is gone and talent raided. That leaves well-funded schools in power conferences fighting for championships, and Kentucky has a 50+ year head start on everyone else in the SEC.


We're about to embark on a time where it is ideal to be a Kentucky. Here are those eras, IMO:

1. Late 40's and early 50's
We had the competitive advantage of hiring an assistant named Rupp away from Phog Allen (aka "the father of coaching" & the only lineal descendant of James Naismith coaching tree) in an era where he could give 25+ players a scholarship just so other schools couldn't have them. Back then, we were only in competition with a handful of other schools and the tournament field was smaller.

2. Late 80's to mid 90's
UCLA's strange-hold was over, the majority of top players still played for their local high school or at most had transferred to a parochial school or regional power (i.e., the best player in DC goes to DeMatha, the only cross-country moves were to a prep school like Oak Hill or Hargrave). The shoe companies and AAU had seeped into but not entirely corrupted things. It was practically unheard of for a player to declare for the pros after one or two years of college, much less high school, so the best schools could count on having the best talent for a few years at a time. Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, and even UCLA all had really nice runs during this time, which doesn't seem like a coincidence.

3. Mid-2020's forward.
Here's why:

a. No more worries about a Calipari or Sutton scandal-- you can pay players in the open.

b. There's still a restriction on players entering the NBA Draft and the Overtime Elite experiment isn't looking as promising now as it did two years ago. Still, anything that has been lost in recruiting the top high schoolers is more than offset by being able to go into the portal like it's practically NBA free agency (only every player is in a contract year and we're the Celtics or Lakers). 2010 Butler can no longer afford to bring Gordon Hayward and Shelvin Mack back for their 2011 run. Everyone is taking from someone below them on the food chain and Kentucky is one of the few at the top.

c. Most of all, you are in THE most powerful conference in NCAA athletics. Sure, Kentucky doesn't have the same level of major donors like Duke, North Carolina, or UCLA, but the SEC helps offset that. There's a great structure with the SEC money/network deals, and they in a much better place than the Big Ten because it's a logical grouping of teams in contiguous states. Two of the other blue bloods (Duke and North Carolina) are locked into a horrible ACC deal that members are losing millions on and suing to get out of while taking flights to play Cal, Stanford & SMU in the meantime. The other blue blood (Kansas) is having to recalibrate to the Big XII's transition and zig-zag from WVU to BYU to UCF to Arizona State. One of "new blood" (UConn) will struggle because their football situation. We'll revisit Villanova & Indiana once a coach whose name isn't Wright or Knight does something significant.

Other SEC schools may be catching up, but there are 15 of them trying to beat each other out to be the #2 to Kentucky (or the #3 to Florida, at best). I'd worry more if it were Florida every year, but it's a Florida, Auburn, and Alabama run that's just happened to overlap a bit lately.

Do you think any of the recently successful SEC schools would take a Final Four for a CFP semifinal if they could only choose one? Do you think any SEC school not named Kentucky would? I don't, but would concede that Arkansas could be debateable. Are we even having this conversation if Auburn had won it? No. Houston? Probably not. We definitely aren't if it was Duke.

If you think it's a bad time to be Kentucky (as a program), I'm very interested in how many other programs you'd rather be, who they are, and why.