UK alum Tom Leach has been the play-by-play “Voice of the Wildcats” for the football Cats for 12 years and 9 year’s for men’s basketball. He is a four-time winner of the Kentucky Sportscaster of the Year award. Tom offers an entertaining and insightful perspective into UK athletics. Column entries will be posted twice per week through April. Read Tom’s full biography

Brought to you by:

= = =

At the start of the season, ESPN college basketball analyst Jay Bilas didn’t think Kentucky could win the national championship, because of its inexperience. But two months, the Wildcats’ play has caused him to re-think that opinion.

Bilas believes it’s a much more wide open race than it was last year when a veteran North Carolina team began and ended the year as the best team. He thinks a team as young as Kentucky could not win it all in a year like 2009 when there were several elite teams with experience. But in the 2010 race, he says the Cats are definitely in the mix, thanks to what he calls “stunning” improvement from mid-November to now.

“This Kentucky team now can win the national championship. Last year, they couldn’t. If you put this same team in last year’s field, that team would not have won the national championship. It can this year,” Bilas suggested in an interview with tomleachky.com “Does that mean this year should be thrown out? No. This happens all the time.

“I think it has been remarkable what Kentucky has accomplished and it’s not just the young players and the fact that they have freshman at prominent positions. It’s that every player on the roster is new to John Calipari and his system, and they are all new to him,” Bilas continued. ” I was one of those that thought that a lack of experience and a lack of having played together before would have caught up to them by now in at least a game or two, but every time they have been challenged or faced adversity, they have shown a tremendous amount of resiliency. And I think it’s really remarkable. I think the job John Calipari has done in his first year at Kentucky is remarkable and I cannot think of one through the first 16 games of a coach’s tenure that has been any better.”

In what areas has Kentucky shown the most growth?

“I think their decision-making has gotten better and their cowboy wildness has subsided in a good way. We used to call it, when I was an assistant, the ‘Superman complex’, where the kid has the best of intentions but pulls into the phone booth pull off his shirt and says ‘I am going to do this’. They are not doing that as much,” Bilas observed, adding that he’s been impressed with the Cats’ defense and that Calipari’s teams have always been distinguished by how well they guarded the opponent.

To Bilas, this year’s championship race reminds him of the 2006 season. That year, the favorite, Connecticut, was upset in a regional final by George Mason.

“I don’t think anybody had a reasonable handle on who was going to win and ultimately it was Florida. UCLA made it to their first of three straight Final Fours. I think it is a lot like that (in 2010) and if I were coaching the 14th-best team in the country right now. I would feel pretty darn confident that if we stick by what we are doing and we get better, we have just as good a chance to win it. Kansas has shown they can be beaten. I believe Texas can be beaten. I believe Kentucky can be beaten. They can all certainly be beaten in an NCAA tournament where stranger things happen on a neutral court with different officials.”

Can one of the top teams in the current polls take that step from “very good” to “great” and start to look more invincible?

“I don’t see anyone, no matter what, being as good as last year as North Carolina was last year. They could score 100 points every night. They were powerful, had already been to a Final Four, they had experience. There is nobody in the field that is bringing a team back that had been to the Final Four the year before. So, everyone is different from last year. I thought that Michigan State could elevate with the players they have but they have gotten off to a slower start than I expected. Some of it has to do with injuries and leadership issues, but I think they are still a team that can win this whole thing. There are a number of them. I don’t want to cap it and say there are like eight teams that can win this whole there. I would say there are, if the one on top gets clipped along the way, there are as many as 15 to 20 teams that can have a shot or an outside shot.”