Kentucky Looks Primed to Steamroll Weak SEC Again After South Carolina Blowout

It’s annual point of pride for college basketball coaches to tell us how tough their league is. It’s always better than perceived.

Well, do not let John Calipari feed you that line of bull.

The SEC is lousy this season, the latest proof an 85-69 snoozefest for fifth-ranked Kentucky over No. 24 South Carolina on Saturday night at Rupp Arena.

The Wildcats played 32 minutes without arguably their best player, point guard De’Aaron Fox, who rolled his ankle and spent a majority of the game on the bench in a walking boot with a big smile on his face.

Calipari told the media after the game that Fox's ankle is not swollen and "might've been a stinger." (My unqualified medical opinion is his ankle roll didn’t look like an injury that will keep him out significant time, nor did the smile on his face suggest this was serious.)

South Carolina was also without one of its best players, PJ Dozier, and is not terrible. But if that’s the second-best team in the league, then the rest of Kentucky’s season past next Saturday’s showdown with No. 2 Kansas is going to be a bore.

The Cats will win the league, probably go undefeated and arrive at the NCAA tournament with a shiny record and No. 1 seeding.

The question Big Blue Nation should ask: Is this a good thing?

Kentucky is talented enough to compete for a national title, and the big difference between the Wildcats and other challengers is they will go mostly untested down the stretch.

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

There are two ways to look at this.

Going through a gauntlet of a conference schedule can be exhausting. Kansas, for instance, plays in what KenPom.com’s numbers say is the best league in America. The Jayhawks go only seven deep, and star point guard Frank Mason III is playing 35 minutes a night. Without many gimmes on the schedule, Mason and KU’s other starters are going to continue to play heavy minutes, and that can be taxing.

The Wildcats are outscoring SEC opponents by 20 points per game. Fox, Malik Monk and Co. get the luxury of hamming it up on the sideline in the final minutes of most games.

Come March, they should be as rested as any elite team in the country.

The other way to look at UK’s yellow brick road through the SEC is the Wildcats are not going to experience many, if any, close games. Calipari will be left to using practice to prepare his players for the late-game, pressure-packed situations that March will bring.

I’m not sure which side of the fence I sit on; however, recent historical data suggests UK would be better suited to play in a more competitive league.

In the last 15 years, only one team has won an NCAA title going undefeated in conference play—Calipari’s 2011-12 Wildcats—and only two champs came from leagues that ranked lower than fourth based on Ken Pomeroy’s computer ratings.

Champion	League	League rank	In-conf. record
2016: Villanova	Big East	3rd	16-2
2015: Duke	ACC	3rd	15-3
2014: UConn	AAC	7th	12-6
2013: Louisville	Big East	2nd	14-4
2012: Kentucky	SEC	4th	16-0
2011: UConn	Big East	2nd	9-9
2010: Duke	ACC	2nd	13-3
2009: North Carolina	ACC	5th	13-3
2008: Kansas	Big 12	2nd	13-3
2007: Florida	SEC	2nd	13-3
2006: Florida	SEC	3rd	10-6
2005: North Carolina	ACC	1st	14-2
2004: UConn	Big East	4th	12-4
2003: Syracuse	Big East	3rd	13-3
2002: Maryland	ACC	3rd	15-1

The SEC currently ranks fifth, according to KenPom.com, ahead of the Pac-12, which many would argue is a better league with Oregon, Arizona and UCLA at the top. (Bottom-feeder Oregon State, ranked 291st on KenPom.com, hurts the league’s rating. The SEC’s biggest dud, Missouri, ranks 190th.)

The last time Calipari had a title-worthy squad, the 38-1 Cats from 2014-15, the SEC also ranked fifth that year. Did the lack of challenge result in a Final Four loss to Wisconsin? Debatable.

When the Wildcats did win the title in 2012, there were two other teams in the league (Vanderbilt and Florida) that ranked in the top 16 on KenPom.com, and Vandy beat UK in the SEC tourney that year.

It might be a point of pride to play in the best league in America, but as the chart shows, it rarely leads to that league producing a national title.

Anytime you start to study national champions, there are also obvious outliers. The 2013-14 Connecticut Huskies' run to a title, for instance, makes no sense whatsoever.

North Carolina, the other team that wasn’t in a top-four league, did have a legit challenger that year in Duke, which ranked ninth.

Michael Reaves/Getty Images

Florida, currently 16th on KenPom.com, is the highest-ranked team in the SEC outside of Kentucky, and the Gators just lost at home to 9-10 Vanderbilt.

This is no fault of Kentucky’s. (Calipari cannot recruit for everyone!) The league should start trending upward the longer coaches like Ben Howland (Mississippi State) and Bruce Pearl (Auburn) are at their programs. At least, you’d think.

But this is what it has come to in the SEC. The only debates are: Will the Cats go undefeated in conference play? Can they do so by historic margins? How does that impact them come March?

Thank goodness for the SEC-Big 12 challenge, which will give us KU-UK next Saturday at Rupp.

As for the rest of the SEC season...

Yaaaaawn.

C.J. Moore covers college basketball and football for Bleacher Report. You can follow him on Twitter: @CJMooreBR.