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Charles Bertram Lexington Herald-Leader
Kentucky (with Billy Gillispie) has a strong legacy, but its last title came when some UH players were not yet 10 years old.
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Bluegrass blues
There are many indications that an un-Kentucky-like season is brewing for the Wildcats:Victories (4): The Wildcats haven't exactly beaten a who's who of college basketball, with their wins (all at home) coming against Central Arkansas, Liberty, Texas Southern and Stony Brook.
Losses (4): There's no shame in losing to No. 1 North Carolina and No. 13 Indiana. But the Wildcats also stumbled at home by 16 points to Gardner Webb, which has since lost seven games, including one to Radford. And a UAB team that has four losses beat Kentucky in Louisville.
RPI (180): It's early, but Kentucky has a lot of work to do to get its power ranking to a respectable level. That RPI ranks last in the Southeastern Conference.
Billy Gillispie is back, coaching a game in these parts for the first time since he did a two-faced two-step out of Texas A&M.
The little paperboy from Graford has made so good, he grew up to become the big-shot head coach of the Kentucky Wildcats. Gillispie got the whole thing in writing, but wait. He and the school haven't formally signed a contract. More than eight months after Gillispie never got around to signing the contract extension he'd agreed to at A&M, he's working under a two-page "memorandum of understanding" with Kentucky.
Understanding? Kentucky? Let us take a recess until the laughter of Tubby Smith, Rick Pitino, Eddie Sutton and Joe B. Hall subsides.
Three straight losses
The basketball Catstituency in Kentucky is about as understanding as a scorned spouse during divorce proceedings, and Gillispie is off to a 4-4 start. Kentucky brings a three-game losing streak into Hofheinz Pavilion for tonight's game against the Houston Cougars. The Wildcats have fallen to No. 180 in the Ratings Percentage Index, and they've used seven starting lineups, and Gillispie's first marquee recruit has requested a transfer, and ...
Stop. UH coach Tom Penders can't take it anymore.
Penders took an informal poll of his players the other day, asking how many of them had been recruited by A&M when Gillispie was the coach.
Nobody raised their hand.
Penders asked for a show of hands from the UH players who had been recruited by Kentucky.
Nobody raised their hand.
"They're down to eight McDonald's All-Americans," Penders said, chuckling, perhaps embellishing. "Let's have a collection."
Kentucky is the bluest of the blueblood basketball programs, owning the all-time record for victories. Thirteen Final Four appearances. Seven national championships. The standards are so high, Smith got run off with a 263-83 record and one national championship.
That national title came in 1998, when UH freshman guards Brockeith Pane and Zamal Nixon were 9.
"It's funny," Penders said. "Kids today, I don't know how into history they are. Now I tell them about it, because I think it's important. Whether they listen or not, I still tell them."
The Cougars crossed paths with the Wildcats 11 months ago at Rupp Arena.
Coming off three consecutive losses that dropped their record to 5-6, UH rallied to pull into a tie at 68 with less than three minutes remaining. The Wildcats pulled away to win 77-70.
Look at the Cougars now
That was the Cougars then, searching for respectability. Look at them now: 9-1, with an eight-game winning streak. Forward Dion Dowell missed three consecutive free throws at a key point in the Kentucky game.Dowell has matured into a confident, consistent, 6-6 senior who is second on the team in scoring (13.9 points per game), first in rebounding (8.5), first in blocks (2.5). Oh, and he's making 89 percent of his free throws.
"We're not playing our best basketball yet," Dowell said. "We've got a lot of young guys, but they bring a lot to the table. I think we're more athletic this year. I think we're much smarter this year. We've got a good team this year. Everybody is playing their role."
The Cougars' all-Conference USA guard, Robert McKiver, has settled into the role of scoring more and forcing the action less. McKiver has hiked his scoring average from 19.2 to 20.2 while playing fewer minutes (33.5 per game, down four minutes from last season) and cutting his shots from 16.1 per game to 13.8.
Freed of point guard responsibilities because of the return of senior Lanny Smith from injury and the emergence of Pane and Nixon, McKiver can let the shots come to him.
Penders, you see, has an understanding with his players. No memorandum necessary, though they must sign the dotted line of the scholarship form first.
A green light system
"If you have game, if you have confidence, you'll flourish in this system," Penders said. "If you don't have confidence in yourself and you don't have a lot of game, you'll be exposed. I never take a kid out for missing shots. I'll take a kid out for taking a terrible shot, but I'll put him right back in."I give the players the right to do what they show me they can do in practice. If they don't score and they're not productive, they can't blame the system. It's a system where you're pretty much given a green light."
The Wildcats, for their part, plunged into darkness in Gillispie's second game. They lost by 16 at home against Gardner-Webb, which is a lot like getting the worst of a five-on-one encounter with Spud Webb.
Kentucky blew a 14-point lead in the final 12 minutes to lose to UAB on Saturday, prompting guard Ramel Bradley to say: "It is so important for us to keep our confidence right now and remind ourselves that we can play good ball."
Penders doesn't want to hear all that. The Wildcats and Cougars have one common opponent this season. UH defeated Texas Southern by 7. Three days later, Kentucky thrashed TSU by 48.
"I really think that we are going to continue to improve," Gillispie said.
He and his Kentucky Catstituency have an understanding, after all.
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