CRAWFORD | No power, no pulse: Vanderbilt freezes Kentucky in 80-55 blowout | UK Sports

LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Kentucky didn’t just get beat at No. 18 Vanderbilt on Tuesday night. It got processed. Filed, stamped, indexed and laminated. A team that had been flying high on a five-game winning streak was brought back to earth with the delicacy of a piano dropped from a rooftop.

Final score: Vanderbilt 80, Kentucky 55. The largest Vanderbilt win over the Wildcats in 18 years.

This was supposed to be the new Kentucky. The post-crisis version. The one that had figured out how to win without a true point guard -- drive the lane, defend the paint, and hope Otega Oweh could muscle them through the bad stretches.

But what showed up in Nashville was the pre-reform model: tentative, turnover-prone, and out of sorts before the first whistle echo had faded.

Kentucky missed its first nine shots and 17 of its first 20. By then, it was down 16 and never got back within single digits. It went 4-for-13 on layups.

Early deficits are nothing new for Kentucky. It opens games like a team that hits snooze at the jump ball.

The Commodores led 43-23 at halftime. But the Kentucky second-half surge was imminent. Right?

That’s what Kentucky does. Down big at Tennessee? Rally. Down at LSU? Rally. But Tuesday, no one answered the bell. The Wildcats stayed stuck in neutral, a sports car with four flat tires and a coach yelling directions from the trunk.

No pulse. No pressure. No pride, late in the game, when they let Vanderbilt dribble down the shot clock — uncontested — with six minutes to play and the deficit hovering at 25. Even the fans stopped yelling. You don’t boo a flat tire. You just call AAA.

Vanderbilt didn’t need its second-leading scorer, Duke Miles, who sat out with injury. It had Tyler Tanner. He scored 19 points, dished 5 assists, stole 4 passes, and spent the evening slicing Kentucky’s defense like a Christmas ham.

Oweh finished with 18 points. Denzel Aberdeen added 15. They were Kentucky’s offense, which is a bit like saying the fire extinguisher was the highlight of the house fire. The rest of the team went just 6-for-25. Nobody else had more than one field goal.

Vanderbilt, which had lost three of four, played inspired basketball. Its coach, Mark Byington, addressed a rebounding issue by going to a bigger lineup. It appeared to work.

Meanwhile, the city of Nashville was still recovering from an ice storm that had left more than 250,000 without power. Even Byington was sleeping on an air mattress in his office.

Kentucky? It looked like it had just rolled out of a cold nap, too.

Vanderbilt outscored Kentucky off turnovers 28-8. It outscored Kentucky from the line 20-11. With just over 11 minutes to play in the game, Malachi Moreno tossed the ball into Otega Oweh, who, thinking Moreno wanted him to take it out, stepped over the endline for a turnover. Sleepwalking.

And Vandy freshman Chandler Bing had the final word after a steal and emphatic slam with a minute to play. A dunk that said: We didn’t just beat you. We enjoyed it.

Now the Wildcats go home with more questions than answers. The winning streak is over. The point guard problem has reappeared like a rerun no one wanted. And whatever offensive identity they thought they’d found over the last two weeks just got left behind on I-65.

They didn’t just lose their grip in Nashville.

They ran the thing into a ditch. Kentucky coach Mark Pope will have to figure out a way to tow it out in time to face a surging Arkansas team in Fayetteville on Saturday.