If Kentucky basketball fails to make it out of Milwaukee, is this season a failure?

You don’t need to be a dedicated follower of the greatest tradition in the history of college basketball to know that the Kentucky Wildcats haven’t advanced beyond the first weekend of the NCAA Tournament in many a moon.

The 2019 Cats reached the Elite Eight before falling in overtime to Auburn. Then 2020 brought the COVID cancellation. And 2021 brought COVID’s after-effects, i.e. a 9-16 record. Then 2022 brought the shocking first-round loss to Saint Peter’s; 2023 the second-round loss to Kansas State; 2024 the shocking first-round loss to Oakland.

Now it’s 2025. New coach. New team. New first-round opponent for the No. 3 seed Wildcats in the No. 14 seed Troy Trojans for Friday’s 7:10 p.m. start at the Fiserv Forum. New question. Sort of.

Is this Kentucky basketball season a failure if Mark Pope’s first team fails to make it to next week’s regional semifinals in Indianapolis?

Any other year, the answer is a no-brainer. March is the reason for the season. The bar is high. Especially when eight national championship banners hang in the rafters of your gym. Hall of Famer John Calipari is now the head coach at Arkansas precisely because he suffered embarrassing opening-round upsets two of the last three seasons. Cal stopped meeting the bar, including his own.

I’m sure a slice of Big Blue Nation believes UK’s regular season didn’t clear that high bar either. The Cats are 22-11. They were the No. 6 seed in the SEC Tournament with a 10-8 league record. They took a convincing 29-point second-round beating at the hands of Nate Oats and Alabama last week in Nashville. They were 18th in the Week 20 AP Top 25.

And Kentucky is far from a lock to beat both Troy on Friday and the winner of Illinois-Xavier on Sunday. Nothing in the NCAA Tournament is written in ink.

“It’s very, very difficult,” said Ole Miss coach Chris Beard on Thursday when I asked the 2019 national runner-up how difficult it is to get out of the tournament’s first weekend. “A couple things. One, you never take for granted coming to the NCAA Tournament. It’s really difficult no matter what your conference, no matter what your situation. These things don’t just happen because of what’s on your jersey. . . .

“In my opinion, the most important game in any tournament is the first game. It’s something Coach (Bob) Knight talked about often. The first time he said it, I didn’t have to put it in my journal. I heard it, I thought about it, and I think about it every day since.

“For us, with our team, we set up every tournament as a four-team tournament. We never look that far ahead, whether it’s the conference tournament or now the national tournament. We’re in a four-team bracket here.”

And what if Kentucky fails to make it out of its four-team bracket?

To me, an early exit won’t put an F-grade on the season. Far from it. This is a new team with an all-new roster playing for a new head coach. It has battled through injuries to post eight wins against teams ranked in the AP Top 15, including Duke, Gonzaga, Florida, Mississippi State, Texas A&M, Tennessee (twice) and Missouri.

More importantly, Pope has firmly placed his stamp on the program. We know he wants to play an uptempo style. We know he’s a firm believer in analytics. We know he can connect with the fans. (Free gas cards!) We know how he wants to build a roster, balancing touted recruits with returnees and key imports from the transfer portal. He’s brought a brighter, more enthusiastic, forward-thinking presence to Kentucky basketball.

This is not to say I expect Kentucky to lose this weekend. I don’t. When I asked Beard if the SEC’s brutal schedule this season would help or hurt the league in NCAA play, he said, “that chapter has yet to be written.” I think it will help Kentucky. The Cats won’t see anything this weekend they haven’t seen before.

So I expect we’ll see them next week in Indianapolis. And if we don’t, I’ll still call this season a success. But remember: from here, the bar only gets higher.

This story was originally published March 20, 2025 at 6:33 PM.

John Clay

Lexington Herald-Leader

859-472-4218

John Clay is a sports columnist for the Lexington Herald-Leader. A native of Central Kentucky, he covered UK football from 1987 until being named sports columnist in 2000. He has covered 20 Final Fours and 42 consecutive Kentucky Derbys. Support my work with a digital subscription