One of the unusual aspects about coaching or playing men’s basketball at Kentucky is that how the Wildcats fare in conference games is not what sets the mood of UK fans toward their team.
When, like UK, you have won 48 regular-season Southeastern Conference titles and 31 SEC Tournament championships, your fan base takes those achievements as a given.
At Kentucky, it is how the Cats fare against UK’s peer group of college hoops blue bloods — Duke, Indiana, Kansas, Louisville, North Carolina and UCLA — that sets the temperature in the Big Blue Nation.
The bad news for Coach John Calipari’s 2018-19 Wildcats (8-2) is they began this season absorbing a 118-84 bludgeoning from Duke that took a lot of steam out of the BBN.