Untouchable Kentucky Proves It's Still in a League of Its Own with Arkansas Rout

For the first time since the rivalry game against the Louisville Cardinals on Dec. 27, college basketball fans and media legitimately entertained the notion of a potential loss for the No. 1 and undefeated Kentucky Wildcats with the red-hot No. 18 Arkansas Razorbacks coming to town.

Man, that was stupid.

The 84-67 final score doesn't even do justice to how much of a slaughter this was. Kentucky was up by 31 points midway through the second half when everyone other than the most diehard members of Big Blue Nation finally decided to change the channel to literally anything else to be more entertained.

This game wasn't quite as absurd as the 72-40 win over Kansas in the Champions Classic or the 83-44 destruction of UCLA on a neutral court in late December, but it was a sobering reminder that—when the Wildcats are engaged—the rest of the country is just fighting for the honor of losing to them in the national championship.

Before what was supposed to be a relatively close game against Arkansas, Kyle Tucker of The Courier-Journal conducted a Q&A with Kentucky assistant coach Kenny Payne.

"I think Arkansas is the type of team that creates a lot of turnovers," Payne said. "They play well against us. It will be a great game. We have to handle their pressure. We have to keep them off the boards and we have to dominate the rebounding game."

James Crisp/Associated Press

What Payne forgot to mention is Kentucky's ability to play suffocating defense.

The Wildcats handled the pressure quite well, turning the ball over just nine times. They won the rebounding battle, but it was not in the dominant fashion anticipated. But as Bill Raftery put it in CBS' broadcast of the game after one of Arkansas' several "acrobatic" shots that wildly missed the mark, "This defense makes you take shots you haven't even tried since the fifth grade."

Kentucky blocked six shots, recorded eight steals and held the Razorbacks to 37.5 percent shooting.

That's otherwise known as business as usual.

Coming into the game, the Wildcats were averaging 7.0 blocks and 6.8 steals per game while holding opponents to a nation-best 34.3 percent shooting.

Just let that last part sink in for a moment. On the entire season, Kentucky's opponents are making all field-goal attempts at a lower rate than Andrew Harrison is making his three-point attempts.

And the scary part is that the Wildcats always seem to save their best for the toughest opponents. Kansas shot 19.6 percent from the field against them while getting 11 shots blocked. They held Louisville to 25.9 percent shooting on its home court. Texas, Providence and UCLA were all unable to reach 30 percent from the field against Kentucky.

"I just think there's more energy from the crowd and from the team, and, you know, we just try to go out there and make a statement every time we play ranked opponents," Kentucky forward Trey Lyles said before the game.

Well, Willie Cauley-Stein certainly made a statement less than three minutes into Saturday's game with an emphatic block/stare combo on Alandise Harris, courtesy of a Vine from CBS Sports' Matt Norlander:

At this point, the only real debate is whether Kentucky can bring that type of intensity throughout the course of the NCAA tournament.

Against the best teams on the schedule, the drive and determination of these Wildcats have been insatiable. If there's so much as an inkling of upset talk before the game, they come out with a noticeable extra bounce in their step.

But looking at the list of SEC teams that have shot better than 40 percent in a game against Kentucky is downright dumbfounding.

Florida has 15 losses and is shooting 43.2 percent on the season, but the Gators shot 49.0 percent against the Wildcats? How in the world did Alabama shoot 44.4 percent and 45.9 percent from the field when facing Kentucky? What allowed Auburn and Missouri—the two worst teams in the SEC—to shoot better than 41 percent against the Wildcats when legitimate title contenders can't even reach 30 percent?

In short, it's hard to give 100 percent 40 times in a season, no matter what the coaching staff tries to tell them.

"Every game we play we're telling them that we're playing a good team," Payne said in the aforementioned Q&A. "When they win they say, 'I thought you said they were good.'"

Assuming the Wildcats get a No. 1 seed—because, well, they will—could their second game against a No. 8 or No. 9 seed actually be the biggest pitfall on the path to perfection?

Apples and oranges, but Kentucky was the No. 1 overall seed back in 2004 and expected to win the entire tournament before falling to UAB in the round of 32. Kansas suffered a similar fate at the hands of Northern Iowa and Ali Farokhmanesh in 2010.

If the Wildcats can survive that steppingstone, though, rest assured they'll be coming at their later-round opponents with everything they've got—a terrifying proposition for the poor teams that happen to step into that bulldozer's path.

The decimation of upset-minded Arkansas was simply our latest reminder of what this Kentucky team is capable of doing when it puts its mind to it.

Kerry Miller covers college basketball for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter @kerrancejames.