The father of a player long committed to Kentucky called and demanded answers.
“What in the world is going on there?” he asked in April. “There just has to be something going on.”
Still to this day, Matthew Mitchell can’t fully answer that question. The Kentucky coach stopped trying long ago.
“You just couldn’t explain it to anybody,” he said recently of the mass exodus of 2016. “You just had to let it absolutely bottom out.”
When the program seemed like it had bottomed out, a new bottom would emerge.
By the middle of May, the carnage was complete: Six players parted ways with Kentucky — all for what appear to be varying reasons — five transferred to different programs and the sixth was kicked off the team for “a failure to uphold standards of the program.