UK alum Tom Leach has been the play-by-play “Voice of the Wildcats” for the football Cats for 12 years and nine years 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
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If the 1996 national championship team was not the best ever at UK, “The Untouchables” are at least in the conversation for that title. And yet they lost twice.
Derek Anderson says he and his teammates did not have their confidence damaged after an early loss to U Mass that season. Instead, he said the setback made them stronger.
“We lost the second game to UMass and then we went on that (27-game) winning streak and it was because we felt we were better than that. We had made mistakes and that is what you do as players–you make mistakes. And we learned from that and found out we had more heart than anybody in the country,” Anderson told coachcal.com’s “Wildcat Legends” section. “It didn’t bother us that we were number one and losing. We were still the better team and we felt that way and proved it. What this team has to do is pull out the memory banks, remember how you lost and play as hard as you can from here on in.
“We took it out on the next team and then the next team and the next team. We continually kept saying that we were so disappointed that we lost. It wasn’t about someone not playing well or the coach. It was us and we stood back and said, ‘Hey, we can’t let this happen again’. And so we just took it out on the other team. There was no arguing in practice and no complaining about any playing time. We had 10 guys that went to the NBA and a couple of other guys that were All-Americans. So we more concerned about playing time but we said forget that and just played. So right now, there mentality right now should be that whoever we are getting ready to play, we just need to take it out on that team.”
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Kentucky and Vandy meet for the 175th time Saturday at Rupp Arena and it will mark the 13th time they’ve met when the Wildcats carried the No. 1 Associated Press ranking.
UK’s record in those games is 8-4. Three of the losses came at Vandy and the other was on a neutral court in the 1951 SEC Tourney finals. The last time they met with the Cats at No. 1 was 1993 and the ‘Dores prevailed in Nashville. You have to go back to UK’s 1978 national title year to find the last time Vandy faced a number one UK team in Lexington.
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While Kentucky moved to the top of the polls this week, the Wildcats only moved up from 10th to seventh in the latest RPIratings.com rankings — behind Syracuse, Kansas, Duke, Villanova, West Virginia and Georgetown.
Jim Sukup, who crunches those numbers each week, says it’s the 117th-rated strength of schedule that has held UK down, but that will change as Kentucky runs into the best teams in the SEC.
“There are three different things that go into the RPI. The first is the winning percentage, which is 30 percent of what goes into the RPI. Second factor is the schedule strength, which is the winning percentage of the opponent you have played after you have taken out the common game between the team and the opponent,” Sukup told tomleachky.com. “After that, the third factor is the opponent schedule strength or the opponent’s opponent’s strength and that is 25 percent of the RPI. The schedule percentage is 50 percent of the RPI. And just to clarify winning percentage, about five years ago the NCAA decided to weight the winning percentage for home and away games. So if you win a home game, you actually get credit for point-six wins. If you win a road game, you get credit for one point-four wins. Lose a road game you get credit for point-six losses and if you lose a home game you get credit for one point-four losses. So that throws a little bit of a wrench in the winning percentage there.”
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Interesting numbers from mrsec.com on talent production in the SEC states. Of the latest committments and early signees, the most have come from the state of Georgia — and the least from the state of Kentucky.
Georgia has produced 57 new recruits thus far this recruiting season, followed by Florida’s 41. Alabama has produced 34, Mississippi 30 and Louisiana’s 19 to round out the top five states. Next is South Carolina (15), then Tennessee (10), Arkansas (five) and Kentucky two).
That speaks to the recruiting challenge Kentucky coaches have always faced and why Joker Phillips is putting such a strong emphasis on that part of the program he now leads.
