SEC Tournament 2012: Struggles Against LSU Won't Doom Kentucky

The Kentucky Wildcats were supposed to breeze through the SEC tournament, destroying any and all challengers and taking no prisoners along the way.

We should have known it wasn't going to be that easy. And by "we," I mean both us and them.

Kentucky got a scare from LSU in the quarterfinals of the SEC tourney, which is surprising in part because LSU won just seven conference games during the regular season and in part because Kentucky destroyed the Tigers in their one and only regular season meeting.

Appropriately, the Tigers came out playing like a team with nothing to lose. They ramped up the pressure, causing plenty of discomfort for Kentucky's All-Star lineup. Though the Tigers were down at halftime, it seemed an upset was brewing.

It was not to be. It was not to be because Kentucky simply wouldn't let it be. The Wildcats came out and looked much more like themselves in the second half, and that was thanks in large part to key players like Terrence Jones and Anthony Davis looking much more like themselves.

Doron Lamb summed it all up perfectly after the game was over:

"They punched us in the face in the first half, and in the second half we fought back and pulled out the win," he said, according to the Associated Press.

In the end, the good news for the Wildcats is that they at least escaped with a win. But whether you want to call it a reality check, a wake-up call or whatever, it goes without saying that they escaped with something else.

And this is a good thing. The media and the fans both tend to freak out whenever a great team like Kentucky is reminded of its own humanity, but such reminders can prove useful. All the Wildcats have to do with Friday's scare is take it, wear it and learn from it. They'll be glad they did.

For all their talent, the Wildcats know they can be challenged now, and they have to know that they can be beaten if they happen to get challenged by a team better than LSU (and there are a lot of those out there). And indeed, Kentucky should be thankful that it learned this lesson in the quarterfinals of the SEC tournament and not in the NCAA Tournament.

Kentucky already looms large in the big picture of the NCAA tourney. The Wildcats are viewed as the most talented and most dangerous team in the field. The last thing the rest of the field wants to see is a Kentucky team that is playing with a chip on its shoulder.

After Friday's scare, that's probably what the field is going to get, much to its chagrin.