Bad losses are becoming much more common for Kentucky basketball

On Saturday afternoon, Kentucky suffered a Quadrant 2 loss to Georgia at Stegeman Coliseum. However, this wasn’t your normal road loss in the SEC. In a game that the Wildcats could not afford to drop, the defense could not buy a stop for most of the game, the offense was ice cold to begin the first half, and poor crunch time execution again led to another loss.

Using rankings at KenPom, Kentucky has now suffered five sub-100 losses in the last four seasons. Two of those lose losses were sub-200 defeats to South Carolina (2022-23) and Evansville (2019-00). Bad losses are becoming much more frequent for the Wildcats and that is hurting them when it comes to Selection Sunday.

We never got to that point in 2020, but Kentucky was likely headed to a No. 3 or No. 4 seed in 2020 despite an outright SEC title and a 25-6 overall record due to a pair of sub-100 losses in the non-conference. It was after Selection Sunday in 2022 when Kentucky suffered the worst defeat of his coaching career when sub-100 Saint Peter’s knocked Kentucky off as a No. 15 seed in the opening round of the NCAA Tournament. In what was supposed to be a bounce back year, the Cats are currently on the outside looking in of the tournament with a pair of sub-100 losses after Saturday.

This never used to be a problem for Kentucky basketball under John Calipari.

In the first 10 years the Hall of Fame head coach roamed the sidelines in Lexington, the Wildcats suffered only three sub-100 losses and zero sub-200 losses.

• 2011: at Arkansas (No. 113)
• 2013: at Georgia (No. 113)
• 2014: at South Carolina (No. 112)

In both 2011 and 2014, Kentucky used bad losses in February as a springboard into deep tournament runs. In 2013, Kentucky was without Nerlens Noel and ended in the NIT but that year was a small blip in a dominant run by Calipari.

Those days seem long gone now. Kentucky is consistently having to deal with bad losses on its resume and that is leading to mediocre results when compared to this program’s historical success. The Kentucky program has many issues to fix in the offseason. One is figuring out a way to avoid the bad losses that can sink a tournament resume.