Calipari

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Worse than losing to Duke by 34 points?

Yes, it certainly was.

Evansville 67, Kentucky 64 will resonate louder and longer than the first game of the season that John Calipari’s basketball program lost to Team Krzyzewski a year ago.

Duke had three lottery picks. Evansville has a beloved former Wildcat (Walter McCarty) as its coach, but the Purple Aces don’t have three guys that Calipari sent a recruiting email.

Let’s not kid ourselves. McCarty doesn’t have anybody who picked playing for Evansville over playing for Kentucky, Duke, Michigan State or Kansas out of high school. McCarty fishes in the shallow mid-major pond.

Evansville is a proud, ambitious program that won Division II titles back in the days of Jerry Sloan, billions of years ago.

These days, the Purple Aces are a middle-tier Missouri Valley Conference program whose best players sometimes graduate in three seasons so they can play on a bigger stage their senior season — somewhere like Northwestern or Missouri, not Kentucky.

Evansville 67, Kentucky 64 — two nights before the Purple Aces return home to play Indiana (Kokomo), an NAIA program from an IU regional campus north of Indianapolis.

Evansville 67, Kentucky 64 — a season after the Purple Aces (11-21) lost 12 of their last 14 games, including one by 23 points to Indiana State and another by 15 to Northern Iowa in McCarty’s first season. Evansville last made the NCAA Tournament in 1999, the NIT in 1998.

Evansville 67, Kentucky 64 — a week after the Wildcats looked like Calipari’s best team in several seasons while controlling top-ranked Michigan State for 40 minutes in Madison Square Garden with Dick Vitale extolling their potential.

Evansville 67, Kentucky 64 — barely 33 hours after the Wildcats earned 64 of 65 first-place votes in the Associated Press college basketball poll and turned the one dissenting voice (Dave Borges of the New Haven (Conn.) Register) into a regional celebrity.

Yep, yep, yep, yep.

Kentucky will have to wear this one like an ink stain on their lapel everywhere the Wildcats go this winter.

They showed the final score on the scoreboard at Simon-Skjodt Assembly Hall in Bloomington on Tuesday night during Indiana’s victory over North Alabama, and it stirred a rousing chant of “Ev-ans-ville! Ev-ans-ville! Ev-ans-ville!”

They’ll be selling T-shirts in southwestern Indiana around the Evansville campus.

I flipped through the college basketball coverage on several other networks, and it was the first thing several studio hosts talked about, showing a clip of an Evansville player out-scrapping two Kentucky guys for an offensive rebound and basket that essentially sealed the victory in the final minutes.

This was Kentucky’s most embarrassing regular-season loss since...

VMI or Gardner-Webb under Billy Gillispie?

Those Kentucky teams were not ranked No. 1.

Keep digging. The floor will remain open. It was the first time Calipari lost a pre-conference game to a mid-major during his 10 seasons in Lexington. If Tubby Smith had lost a November game like this, the vitriol would percolate.

It will inspire another burst of questions and message-board threads about the way Calipari builds and rebuilds his roster with one- or two-year players every season.

Is it the end of Kentucky’s season?

Hardly. This is the same team that just beat Michigan State, the consensus preseason No. 1 pick, on a neutral court, a week ago. Talent is not the issue. There's not a team on the schedule the Wildcats cannot beat.

The Wildcats only dropped to No. 5 in Ken Pomeroy’s postgame computer rankings. They’re still the team to beat in the Southeastern Conference. They have a couple of guys who are likely to be taken in the first round of the 2020 NBA Draft, certainly taken ahead of anybody on McCarty’s roster.

But it’s the kind of loss that could knock the Wildcats’ down a seed line when the NCAA Tournament Selection Committee deliberates in four months -- even though ESPN bracketologist Joe Lunardi said that was not so.

It’s the kind of loss that had me researching the resumes of national champions during the last two decades, looking for a team that lost an early game to a mid-major and then roared back to win the title.

I found one semi-example: North Carolina started its 2004-05 season with an 11-point loss to Santa Clara. And that was on a neutral court.

Otherwise, teams that win national championships don’t lose games, especially home games, to teams like Evansville, which came to Rupp Arena ranked No. 137 in Ken Pomeroy.

But Kentucky did.

It's a moment the Wildcats will have to wear for the rest of the season.

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