Kentucky basketball's 'Endgame'
Fandom doesn’t die when left unnourished. It gets shelved for something more fulfilling.
Fandom doesn’t die when left unnourished. It gets shelved for something more fulfilling.
It’s never been easier than now to ignore the thing around which your life revolves if it stops meeting your expectations. Movies in the Marvel Cinematic Universe fail to captivate you in the same way following AVENGERS: ENDGAME? Netflix streams about 4,000 movies in the U.S. alone, and a lot of them have superheroes. Luke Combs go all-in on bro country for his latest album? There’s a Joe Diffie-inspired TikTok star1 who will never be on the radio but whose latest single has 10 million views. Stephen King’s latest novel not frighten you enough? There are hundreds of creepy stories on Reddit, some even intentionally so.
Has your favorite college basketball team underwhelmed for the better part of three years? Maybe it should be left on the shelf.
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The 2014-15 season was Kentucky basketball’s AVENGERS: ENDGAME. But Thanos won.
A promise of 40-0, depending on your perspective, was undone by a coach who planned better or one who refused to play the two best guards on his team. A UK team that brought ample joy — and the prospect of unprecedented triumph — to the commonwealth finished as another group that fans will “What if?” until they’re buried in their Richie Farmer jerseys.
John Calipari has coached several of those teams, but that’s the one that matters more than any. Kentucky basketball was at its apex. It was the fourth team in a five-year stretch to reach the Final Four, and on the precipice of becoming the second in four years to win a national title. It didn’t, and all parties involved have chased an unobtainable high ever since.
Marvel’s chasing the same thing now. AVENGERS: ENDGAME was the culmination of a decade-long filmgoing extravaganza. Like Kentucky’s NIT team in 2012-13, there were letdowns along the way, but they were smaller bumps in the road amid captivating experiences, all leading up to one of the most rewarding experiences in movie-going history. Kentucky’s 2014-15 campaign was that, except it ended right before Captain America whispers, “assemble.”
Kentucky and Marvel have generated high-quality output since those milestones, but the results are more mixed with both. Marvel’s building up to whatever its next landmark event is, and maybe it’ll be awesome, but creating an ENDGAME-level hype cycle won’t be as easy in 2029 as it was in 2019, if for no other reason than that the world will be more segmented than it already is. People have only so much attention to give. The machine keeps cranking out content, but the cracks in its armor show more and more, making it easier to put off binges of bloated TV series and movies that can feel more like homework than entertainment.
That’s been even more true of Kentucky basketball since its own apex.
The program isn’t fun to watch, and that’d be as bad as the losing if the losing hadn’t become as frequent as it has in the last three years. Since the end of the 2019-20 season — a campaign halted by the COVID-19 pandemic — Kentucky is 43-28 overall (a .606 win percentage) and 4-13 against teams ranked in the Associated Press top 25. Its winning percentage against Southeastern Conference teams in that time is just a touch better (22-14, .611%). Over that same span, the victory rate at four other “bluebloods” of college basketball …
Duke: 55-21 (.723)
Kansas: 66-16 (.804, reigning national champion)
North Carolina: 56-25 (.691)
UCLA: 60-20 (.750)
A two-and-a-half year sample can be misleading — Kentucky’s is weighed down by a historically bad season in 2020-21, for example. But, it isn’t nothing, especially when you’re almost four years removed from your most recent NCAA Tournament victory.
Kentucky’s main problem is that Calipari will never have a hot seat, because he owns it outright. Imagine if Kevin Feige entertained an offer from Warner Bros. Discovery to oversee its DC movie universe and Marvel signed him to an outrageous contract to keep him from walking. UCLA was the WBD to UK’s Marvel, and thus the University of Kentucky is bound to Calipari for as long as he sees fit.
With that comes all the good — a P.T. Barnum-esque showman, an incredible recruiter, an NBA whisperer, a Hall of Fame track record — but also the bad: an insistence on playing multiple bigs against small, quick lineups; a consistent inability to adjust on the fly in high-pressure games; the reluctance to engage in any meaningful way with media; a relationship with fans that increasingly feels more combative than friendly.
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Why would a top-10 NBA draft pick enroll at the University of Kentucky in December and then feel like not playing for you would be better for his draft stock than playing?
How could a coach coming off the most embarrassing NCAA Tournament loss in his program’s history feel emboldened to beg for a (likely unnecessary) practice facility?
What made Kentucky’s basketball coach think that belittling — intentionally or not — the accomplishments of his school’s recently more successful football program was a reasonable thing to do?
The last year alone has offered myriad questions, on and away from the court, for Kentucky fans to become disillusioned with the direction of their basketball program. A promising 2023 recruiting class — stuffed with four five-star prospects and an in-state legacy player with the skills to stand on the court with them — seems like the only thing preventing an all-out mutiny from a fanbase starving for something — anything — good to happen.
But what will that group need to achieve? Can John Calipari once again gather a collective of uber-talented freshmen and field a No. 1 seed in the NCAA Tournament? Would an Elite Eight finish be enough to satiate the so-called “bennies?” March Madness isn’t a crapshoot, but its inherent randomness ensures that its “best” team seldom takes the crown. Kentucky knows that, deeply. Honestly, it’s hard to believe anything short of a Final Four would go down smoothly after the last half decade. And even that may not be filling for many.
That’s next year. In this one, Calipari again demands “patience” from fans watching yet another team struggle to jell and form a winning identity. Wildcats like these one have gone on to create fun memories — 2011 and 2014 were similarly sloppy before their Final Four trips — but those units flashed signs of offensive brilliance along the way, and didn’t have to face SEC gauntlets like this one will. Kentucky’s listless bludgeoning at Missouri, in all likelihood, wasn’t its first in conference play this season. How many more will it be allowed to suffer before the preseason contender finds itself on the pretender’s bubble? How many more times can John Calipari ask Kentucky fans, desperate for any reason to believe in a program stuck on “mid,” to stop caring so much before they finally disengage?
There’s are a lot of good movies outside of Marvel. There’s music that can be heard away from the radio. And there’s a lot of high-quality basketball being played elsewhere.
You’re no less of a fan if you choose to pull a Shaedon Sharpe and engage with something other than the Wildcats. Kentucky basketball will be just fine on the shelf. In some ways, it’s already been there for a while.
Cat Corner
It was unbearably cold in Kentucky last weekend. Blankets were enjoyed by people and kitties alike.
Y’all be good.
FYI: What I Watched in 2022, Pt. 2, will run next week. Here’s Pt. 1, ICYMI.
I’m not a regular TikTok user, so I can’t confirm whether this person exists beyond a metaphor, but if they do can someone please share?