Mitch Barnhart says Kentucky must return to championship level: "Our fans deserve that"

Kentucky has not won an NCAA Tournament game since 2019, no Final Four appearances since 2015. It’s no longer the winningest program in NCAA history, with Kansas tying that mark this weekend. A win in the Sweet 16 this weekend will push the Jayhawks ahead of the Wildcats on the all-time wins list.

To put it simply, Kentucky has not been the gold standard of college basketball in recent years. We’ve seen good teams, sure, but not championship-level.

Following Kentucky’s most recent loss to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in the NCAA Tournament, UK Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart made it clear that frustrations are justified. Fans are hurt, and they should be, especially considering the time and money they pour into the program. It’s a difficult time for the Big Blue Nation.

“I’ve been here 20 years at Kentucky and I’ve lived and worked alongside what I consider the greatest fan base in America,” Barnhart said on the UK Healthcare John Calipari Show Monday evening. “There’s no place that we go that there is not an incredible, incredible following of Kentucky fans. We go to the Classics in Vegas or we go to Madison Square Garden, we go to Chicago, it doesn’t matter where we go, there’s an amazing number of people in blue and white there. That’s the reason why, number one, we’re invited to participate in a great number of those because they want our folks to come. The second reason is that we’ve got a program that is built for March and built for championships. That is something we take great pride in.”

It’s built for March and built for championships, but the results haven’t followed in recent years. Kentucky won the SEC regular-season championship in 2019-20 before COVID-19 canceled the SEC and NCAA Tournaments. Since then, though, just one SEC Tournament win and zero NCAA Tournament victories. The worst season in Kentucky basketball history followed by the worst NCAA Tournament loss in school history.

“We won the SEC championship three years ago, and then the COVID tournament hit and knocked us out, we didn’t have a chance to play it. We’d love to have seen that team continue on,” Barnhart said. “But at the end of the day, we’re built for championships. That’s what this program is all about. It’s about winning SEC championships in the regular season, it’s about SEC titles in the tournament, it’s about championships in March and in early April. Deep, deep runs, that’s what we’re built for. We’re supposed to do those things and we fell short of that this year.”

Barnhart says it is Kentucky’s responsibility to go on deep runs and hang banners in Rupp Arena, a standard that has not been met in recent years.

“To our fans that have been unbelievable — we had an incredible following in Tampa and an incredible following in Indianapolis,” Barnhart said. “I had literally hundreds of people walk up and say, ‘I bought these tickets so long go hoping we’d be here.’ And we disappointed. Our responsibility is to make those deep runs and create those great memories in a good way, in a positive way for our program and our fan base, to hang banners in Rupp Arena. We all want that.”

Now, it’s the program’s job to do what it is designed to do: play championship-level basketball.

“If anybody knows anything about our program as a whole, that’s what we are designed to do,” Barnhart said. “We have built the foundational pieces of Kentucky Athletics and specifically Kentucky basketball to, layer upon layer, give us an opportunity to celebrate championship-level performance. So we need to return to that. Our fans deserve that.

“I am deeply disappointed as they are we didn’t have our chance to experience that this year in Indianapolis, Philadelphia, New Orleans.”