Kentucky Basketball: 5 Moments in Wildcats History I Wish I Could Rewrite

Joe Posnanski had a very interesting article about a month ago that talked about the movie Source Code and how he would apply it to the world of sports. Without providing too lengthy of an explanation, the premise was basically as follows:

What if you could change the outcome of any moment in sports?

Now before you start saying you would make your team win the title every year, you should know that Posanski's hypothetical came with a couple of rules. Namely, you can't just change the result of a game alone or create a whole new ending.

These rules can be pretty well encapsulated in Kentucky's 1992 loss to Duke. You can't just say that you wish Laettner would have missed the shot and Kentucky would have won.

Anyways, I loved the idea and decided to make a few suggestions for the Kentucky basketball program.

Again, these are all moments I would like to change in UK history and how they might, or might not have, changed the outcome of some of UK's biggest moments.

Derek Anderson Never Tears His ACL

This one really hurt. After helping Kentucky win the 1996 NCAA title, Derek Anderson came back to Lexington to form one of the nation's best combinations with superstar Ron Mercer. Anderson was having a terrific senior season until his season came to a screeching halt halfway through the year when he suffered a torn ACL.

Without Anderson, Kentucky wasn't nearly as deep as they had been and was also missing their best player, an explosive wing that could shoot and play great defense. Anderson was so good in fact that he was still drafted 13th in the draft after missing the last half of his senior season.

Go and watch some videos of Anderson at Kentucky and marvel at what they missed. Kentucky still made the NCAA title game in 1997 and took Arizona to overtime in the championship game. I wish I could have seen how good that team would have been had Anderson stayed healthy.

Would they have dominated the tournament and walked away with the title as most UK fans assume? Or would Anderson and Mercer had trouble fighting to be the man when it counted? Also, would some the players who stepped up in 1997 have been able to if Anderson were still on the team?

Finally, if Kentucky had won back to back titles would they still have been hungry enough to win the 1998 title? I wish we could find out.

Pitino Stays in Lexington

If Rick Pitino had never left Lexington to take the coaching job with the Boston Celtics, would he have gone down as the greatest coach of all time?

In eight seasons he had already taken Kentucky to three Final Fours, won one title and had what was largely his team win another one the year after he left. I don't know if he could have kept that up, but what else would he have done in Lexington?

My guess is that Pitino would have easily kept Kentucky at the top of the basketball world and would probably be right there with Coach K in the discussion of best coaches ever in college basketball. My guess is that he would have won a couple of more titles by now and been to several Final Fours.

Or he may have left in the late 1990s to coach the Lakers. There's really no telling, but it would have been interesting to see what transpired if he hadn't left for the NBA at the height of his college coaching career.

Kentucky Puts a Man in Grant Hill's Face

Ugh.

If Kentucky had guarded the inbound pass would they have been able to stop Duke from scoring? Or was it just meant to be that Laettner—who had been perfect from the field during the game—was going to win it for the Blue Devils?

If I had to guess then I actually err on the side of Duke was just meant to win that game. Somehow, Grant Hill was going to get that ball to Laettner and he was going to hit that shot. I really think that.

Then again, how much harder is that pass if Kentucky had just put some 6'10" guy in his face with his hands up? That's a pretty difficult pass to pull off accurately.

At the time and even more so now with the advantage of hindsight, it was such an obvious call to make and Kentucky blew it.

Kentucky Loses to Duke in 1966 Final Four

Ok, so I'm cheating a little bit on this one by changing the result. But I'm not giving Kentucky a win they didn't earn, so let's just consider this to be a little loophole.

While it seems everyone knows about the 1966 championship game pitting all white Kentucky against the first ever all black starting five at Texas Western, most don't realize that had Kentucky lost it would have been all white Duke playing the role of modern day villain. Or would they have?

Personally, I wish Kentucky would have lost that game. As the years go by the facts surrounding that game and the participants have become so distorted against Kentucky that to this day it continues to hurt the school's image. If it would have been Duke in their shoes then I doubt this would have been made as big of a deal as it has been the past couple of decades.

While a great moment in sports history and a wonderful win for equality and civil rights, modern sports writers accept the hated Kentucky and Rupp storyline as the gospel when in truth there is a lot of misinformation out there.

Check this out for more on this game from a Kentucky perspective. It will shed a lot of light on the topic.

I just wish Kentucky had lost.

The Emory Envelope of Cash Never Appears

Forget for now the arguments over whether or not Kentucky even sent the envelope or were set up by UCLA or Arizona boosters. What if that envelope never appeared? What if nobody ever knew about any cash being sent by someone to a Kentucky recruit?

The possibilities are endless. Does Kentucky ever have the Pitino era? Doubtful. Does Sutton ever win a title at Kentucky? Who knows.

Really, this one could go in just about any other direction you can think of. However, this might have been the best thing to happen to Kentucky in the long run. Kentucky fans don't like that it happened, but at least the team took the ball and ran with if and have been clean and highly successful since those dark days.

It was a horrible time, but it led to some of the greatest basketball Kentucky ever saw during the Pitino years and has led to everything Kentucky fans are witnessing today.

But my oh my, what if it had never happened? What would have gone on at Kentucky these past 20 plus years?

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