LEXINGTON, Kentucky — May I be one of the first to raise what ought to be one of the more ridiculous talking points for the beginning of the 2014-15 college basketball season?
This Kentucky team has a shot — a real, honest-to-goodness, not-just-a-scalding-hot-take-but-I’m-being-serious-here shot — at being the first Division I basketball team to go undefeated in nearly four decades.
Think I’m crazy? A case of Midnight Madness a few hours early?
Not as crazy as those who brought up this possibility a year ago, when Kentucky was a freshman-filled, unproven team, one that had what some called the greatest recruiting class of all time but hardly had a shred of big-game experience. (The NIT embarrassment against Robert Morris the year before didn’t count.)
A college basketball team has never won all 40 games, which is what it would take for John Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats to go from Nov. 14, when they play the Grand Canyon Antelopes in Lexington, all the way to April 6, when a new national champion will be crowned at the Final Four in Indianapolis.
The 1975-76 Indiana Hoosiers were the last undefeated team in Division I hoops, going 32-0. UNLV didn’t lose until the Final Four in 1990-91. The 2003-04 St. Joseph’s squad made it all the way to the Atlantic-10 tournament before losing a game, to Xavier. And last year’s Wichita State team headed into the NCAA tournament undefeated and (I thought) had a real shot of going 40-0 and winning it all — until the top-seeded Shockers were upended by, wouldn’t you know it, the Kentucky Wildcats in what was one of the tournament’s most exciting games.
So what’s the chance at perfection? Um, not great. Maybe 3 percent? Maybe a little bit more? If you’re betting one team against the field, and that’s what you’re doing when you say Kentucky could win every game, you always take the field, of course. Especially when the rare teams that have given perfection a run in the past few decades have tended to come from conferences where powder-puff schedules make these things more possible.
That said, this talented, versatile and — yikes! — experienced Kentucky team has as good of a shot at going undefeated as any team since … well, since Calipari’s two-loss, title-winning Kentucky team from three seasons ago.
I brought up the possibility of going undefeated to Calipari when I visited him this offseason in Lexington. I’ll emphasize that: It was me who brought it up.
Can’t say I got a direct answer, but it was interesting nonetheless.
“This was 10 years ago, and I said my goal before I retire is to coach a team to a 40-0 record,” Calipari told me. “Why do you think I said that? Why? My ego, my pride, maybe. But I didn’t believe so. (It was) because they say it can’t be done. And my whole life is about doing stuff that they say can’t be done.”
Sure, he sounds like a politician, tooting his own horn. But there’s plenty of truth to what he says. Plenty of people thought that Anthony Davis team couldn’t win a national title starting three freshmen, and it did. And there was a cacophony of negative voices in early March 2014, when underclassman-filled Kentucky already had lost six SEC games and was flirting with missing its second NCAA tournament in as many seasons, that counted Calipari’s young men out. Sure, the Wildcats’ run to the final was in no small part the result of minor miracles from the fingertips of Aaron Harrison, but that team ended up making the national title game.
“To say it’ll never be done challenges me to say, ‘Well, why don’t we be the group to prove that statement wrong?’ ” Calipari told me. “But it wasn’t like every team I’m saying is going 40-0.”
More likely than going 40-0, Kentucky might get bruised and battered during its non-conference schedule.
The SEC ranked seventh in the nation in conference RPI last season, behind the rest of the FBS leagues plus the Big East and the Atlantic 10. It sent only three teams to the NCAA tournament, and the third, Tennessee, got in by the skin of its teeth, playing in one of the First Four games. A few SEC teams will be better this season — with a talented LSU, a rejuvenated Auburn and a sneaky South Carolina leading the list — but a few will be worse, like Missouri, which will take a step back in the midst of a coaching transition, and Ole Miss, which will lose Marshall Henderson.
Kentucky’s conference slate could be tougher than a year before, but not demonstrably.
Will the Wildcats do it? I doubt it. One reason is that, yeah, it’s really hard to do. The longest winning streak in NBA history was authored by the 1972 Los Angeles Lakers, and that was 33 games. (The longest winning streak in sports history, Wikipedia tells me, came from the Pakistani squash player Jahangir Khan, who won 555 straight matches between 1981 and 1986. But you already knew that.) Another is that even though this team has more experience than the past two seasons’ Kentucky teams, it’s not as if these are 10-year consistent NBA veterans.
But it’s nearly as big of a point to say that the Wildcats can do it — that they have that rare combination of elite talent, postseason experience and time having learned to play with one another. (The extra 10 practices and six games from this offseason’s international trip to the Bahamas can only help with that chemistry.)
I know this will sound like I’m backing off my Big Bold Half-Prediction here, but there’s probably a better chance Kentucky doesn’t make it to Christmas without a blemish than it goes undefeated. Its non-conference schedule is a beast: Kansas, Providence, Texas, UNC, UCLA, Louisville. That’s five NCAA tournament teams before the Wildcats even get to conference play. But three of those games are at home, two are at neutral sites and the last one is just down the road in Louisville. Once the Wildcats get to conference play, their first really big test won’t be until after the Super Bowl, when they head to Florida.
When I visited Lexington this summer, I told sophomore center Dakari Johnson that I planned to write a column saying Kentucky has a shot of going undefeated.
Dakari Johnson and the Wildcats are confident -- just not so confident they again want to talk about running the table.
“Don’t do that,” Johnson told me, laughing. “You’re bound to drop a couple games. You can’t just win them all. If you win them all as a team, that’s not going to do you justice for the tournament because you won’t know what you have to work on. If we drop a couple games, that’ll be good for us.”
Before he even came to Kentucky as a freshman last season, Marcus Lee was publicly musing about that freshman class’s chance at 40-0. As a sophomore, he’s learned his lesson: Don’t make silly predictions that sound like hubris.
“I’m definitely not saying 40-0 again,” he told me. “I’m not going to be the one to say that anymore. That was just me being confident in what I had. It’s the same as I am right now. I’d just rather not repeat it.”
That makes sense. You want to avoid jinxing yourself, plus you want to avoid the sense of schadenfreude that surrounded the struggles of last year’s team.
You’re not going to get a player to predict 40-0. You won’t get Cal to do it either. Hell, Vegas would have to give me really good odds before I’d consider laying $20 down on it.
It probably won’t happen. But with this Kentucky team — this talented, experienced, deep Kentucky team — it really could happen. And that’s really saying something.
Email Reid Forgrave at reidforgrave@gmail.com, or follow him on Twitter @reidforgrave.
