Congrats and best wishes to John Jenkins. The Flamethrower, who passed up the NBA draft last year to come back for his junior season and try to make history, is going to pass up his senior season and turn professional, where he will hopefully be Stephen Curry 2.0 and make a bazillion dollars lighting up Sportscenter every other night. For the first time in at least fourteen years (probably more), I’ve made a note on the calendar for Draft Night.
Of course, that bursts the bubble. Now that JJ23 is going, we have exactly ten players in the mix. And it turns out one of them, Arnold Okechukwu, isn’t even a lock to show up for some reason (and he is the lowest-rated of the prospects). So here we are, six months from Midnight Madness, and we have nine players.
We don’t have enough bodies on this team to scrimmage 5-on-5.
Now what? I’ll tell you now what: this is a 14-team conference with two reasonably sure things and three probably sure things, and a whole lot of maybe. Florida will probably be fine; Billy Donovan has salted a mine down there and they have become a perennial contender. Missouri will arrive with guns blazing, and Arkansas will be loading theirs up fast. Past that, who knows. Cuonzo Martin may have figured it out at Tennessee, Anthony Grant is turning Bama in to a real threat, Tony Barbee is not sleeping down at Auburn, even South Carolina just hired Frank Martin – think Bobby Knight without the charm – who turned freakin’ Kansas State into a basketball threat. Even Georgia has some young talent and LSU’s looking for a new coach and might get lucky there. Only the Mississippi schools are going nowhere (or even backward, given the player hemorrhage at State with Renardo Sidney going pro and other guys transferring or graduating).
And there’s us, nine deep with no seniors and two juniors as the only players with more than a year of college basketball under their belts, and Kedren Johnson’s 3.1 points per game as our top returning scorer.
Am I forgetting anyone?
Oh. Right.
Well, the one consolation is that Kentucky is also going to lose a bunch of guys – their entire starting five will probably get drafted, with Anthony Davis and his eyebrow going #1 overall, and they will be in the same rebuilding mode as we are. Except they are rebuilding with Alex Poythress and probably Shabazz Muhammed and God only knows who else, but you can assume it’ll be another rack of five-star prospects on the one-and-done plan.
To be completely blunt: how in the fucking hell are we supposed to compete with this? Sure, we win some games, and we graduate our guys with legit degrees that actually mean something. Which gets us exactly no respect from the rest of this league. I don’t exactly remember the hordes of other conference teams’ fans chanting “S-E-C” for us against Oregon State in baseball last June or against Harvard last month. We are out there fighting an uphill battle because we do things the right way and nobody gives a shit – win games and hang banners, that’s what’s important around here. Not that we’re getting a lot of respect for winning the SEC Tournament and being one of only two UK losses all year – everyone rolls their eyes and says Kentucky doesn’t care about conference titles and assumes we luck-boxed into it because the Wildcats decided to phone one in. Personally, I’d say it’s a failure of leadership if you can’t get your team fired up for a trophy game, but whatever.
But the point remains the same: there is absolutely no way we can hope to routinely compete in this kind of environment. We sunk two years into recruiting Poythress, a local product who we were on from the start, and it availed us exactly nothing. We took the most talented Vanderbilt team in a generation or more – possibly ever – and managed to beat Kentucky one time in three tries; played them close, sure, made them sweat, but the columns are WON and LOST. Nothing on there about “Made them work for it” or “Tried hard and looked good doing it.” We took our best shot these last two years, and went 1-2 in the Big Dance and won a single conference tournament.
Now, things could have turned out different. If Festus Ezili could have not gotten hurt. Or not gotten jobbed by the NCAA. If one of those overtime games against a ranked opponent could have gone slightly differently, if one of those second half leads could have stood up, if the referees could have actually stopped calling a charge for bringing the ball up the court and instead whistled Wisconsin for two guys holding down our center under the basket.
If. If. If ifs and buts were bros and sluts we’d all have been laid on prom night.
So we’re back to the eternal question: is it worth staying in college basketball’s penthouse suite, pocketing the money, finishing fair-to-middling year in and year out and hoping for a touch of glory once a decade, and knowing that every year means an ass-kicking contest against a big blue and/or orange monster with twenty legs and no ass? Are we prepared to live with “at least we’re finishing sixth the right way” for the next ten to twenty years again?
Or is it time to start thinking about circumstances where “who we are and want to be” and “whether we can win” isn’t an either-or choice?