Is Kentucky men’s basketball on the road to becoming ‘the next Indiana?’
AI-generated summary reviewed by our newsroom.
- Kentucky's program shows multi-year decline with 0-4 start vs power foes.
- Indiana's long downturn shows program drift but Kentucky's slide remains early.
- Mark Pope faces urgent rebuild task to prevent Kentucky following Indiana's path.
Anyone under the age of 45 will have to accept what follows on first-hand testimony from those who lived it: There was a time when the men’s basketball series between Kentucky and Indiana was the fiercest and most entertaining college hoops rivalry in the nation.
In the 1970s and 1980s, in the heyday of the coaching matchups between Joe B. Hall and Bobby Knight, UK-IU was a yearly meeting of basketball heavyweights who loathed each other.
Hall took Kentucky to three Final Fours and won an NCAA title between 1973 and 1985. Knight led Indiana to five Final Fours and won three national championships between 1973 and 1992.
Three times in this era, UK and IU met in NCAA Tournament contests, with the Wildcats prevailing twice. That included Kentucky’s 92-90 upset of Knight’s No. 1 Hoosiers in the 1975 NCAA tourney round of eight that derailed IU’s drive for an undefeated national championship.
Back then, no rivalry in all of men’s college basketball crackled with the intensity of UK vs. IU.
Alas, when Kentucky (6-4) and Indiana (8-2) renew what has been a dormant border rivalry on Saturday night at Rupp Arena, the tenor of the meeting is very different from the glory days of Joe B. and “The General.”
With December only two weeks old, the 2025-26 UK season has already descended into fan discontent.
After an offseason filled by glib talk about winning “number nine,” meaning Kentucky’s ninth men’s hoops NCAA title, Mark Pope’s Cats have started the season 0-4 vs. power-conference foes.
The rough start to the current year follows what has so far been, by UK’s regal men’s hoops standards, a decade of unusually spare results for Kentucky.
As Wildcat-fan frustration has mounted in recent years, one often hears a variation on the following lament: That UK basketball is in danger of becoming “the next Indiana” in the sense of a once-elite program sinking into an enduring period of mediocrity.
With five NCAA championships and eight Final Fours on its résumé, Indiana unquestionably has the pedigree of a college hoops blue blood.
However, IU’s past three decades have been nothing close to elite.
In the latter years of Knight’s tenure on the IU bench, the coach’s erratic personal comportment and authoritarian coaching style combined to undermine Indiana basketball. Over Knight’s final seven seasons (1993-2000), IU never lost fewer than nine games in a year and suffered double-digit defeats in five of seven campaigns.
Yet since the Indiana University administration finally grew weary of Knight’s off-the-court behavioral issues and cut the coach loose, IU basketball has never really been able to build a new brand identity.
The result has been three decades of relative Hoosiers’ mediocrity.
Starting in 1994-95, Indiana has produced a whopping 26 seasons with double-digit losses. In all that time, IU has never lost fewer than seven games in a season.
Over the same time frame, the Hoosiers have had the same number of losing seasons, five, as they have had single-digit-loss seasons.
Indiana has missed the NCAA Tournament six times in the past eight completed seasons. The Hoosiers have not reached a Final Four nor even played in an NCAA Tournament Elite Eight since 2002.
First-year IU head man Darian DeVries, the former Drake and West Virginia coach, is the sixth Indiana head coach (not counting interim head men) since Knight.
In the current decade, Kentucky basketball trends have taken a sharp, downward turn.
UK has had four seasons of double-digit defeats in the past five years.
Through the 2020s to date, Kentucky has won exactly three NCAA Tournament contests combined. To put that in perspective, the Wildcats won a robust 31 NCAA tourney games in the previous decade (2010 through 2019).
Twice now in the 2020s, UK has been eliminated from the NCAA Tournament in the round of 64 by double-digit seeds, falling to No. 15 seed Saint Peter’s in 2022 and No. 14 seed Oakland in 2024.
The Cats have not won an SEC regular season championship since 2019-20. UK has not won an SEC Tournament title since the 2017-18 season.
Most of the responsibility for this period of relative Kentucky basketball decline lies with the previous UK head coach, not the current one.
The feeling of crisis that has engulfed the Wildcat fan base during this season’s dispiriting 0-4 start vs. power-conference foes has as its pretext the struggles that have proceeded this year.
As Kentucky prepares to welcome Indiana to Rupp Arena for the first time since Dec. 11, 2010, claims that the Wildcats’ recent decline is anywhere close to what has befallen Indiana over the past three decades are overwrought.
It is not going too far, however, to say the UK men’s basketball program has taken the first steps down the “Indiana pathway.”
Mark Pope’s task is to reverse that descent, starting with what feels like a near must-win game for Kentucky on Saturday night against the Hoosiers themselves.
