Transcript
Matt Jones (0:00)
Welcome, everyone. It is the local toy dealers KSR post game show a pretty brutally pitiful performance in Nashville tonight. Kentucky goes down 80 to 55. Never is really in the game from the start all the way through. And after two games in Nashville this year against Gonzaga, Gonzaga and Vanderbilt, Kentucky loses by combined 60 points to those two teams in the city that is probably the most loyal to Kentucky fans and Kentucky outside of the state. You can give us a shout. 859-280-2287. Look, it's 12:15 at night and we just lost by 25 points. So this is one of those where I say, if you're up right now and you're listening, then I consider you my friend, unless you are really rude, but otherwise I don't think you will be because why would you stay up this late? So, 859-280-2287. When you call this late, this is your best chance, Billy, to actually get to talk without me cutting you off, because we have to fill this hour with something.
Billy Gillespie (1:10)
Big opportunity.
Matt Jones (1:11)
Big opportunity. Big opportunity to get. Get your words in. Look, this is an awful performance. Kentucky is now, what, 14 and 7? I will talk in a second about the season as a whole, but I think some perspective on what we continue to see in these games against good teams. Kentucky has played eight games this year on the road against. On the road or on a neutral court. Eight games. And in those eight games, Kentucky's been behind by double digits in every single game. By double digits in every single game. Even more stark, they've been down 17 points in seven of the eight games. So on the road this season, Kentucky has been an absolute dud in the first half of these games on the road, Kentucky has been awful. Not just, I mean, not bad awful. Now, to their credit, they came back against St. John's came back against LSU, came back against Tennessee. So they're only three and five in eight games where they've been down double digits on the road. But it's still awful performances and they've been absolutely embarrassed four times. I think it is very rare for a good Kentucky team to get embarrassed once during the season. Sometimes it'll happen on the road. Usually in the sec, you'll let one get by you. He's been embarrassed four times. Michigan State, Gonzaga, Alabama and Vanderbilt have beaten Kentucky in games that they've never once been in the entire game. At any point throughout the entire game, they've never been in it. That almost never happens twice a year. It's happened four times. And there's a decent chance. With games at Arkansas and at Florida still to come, it could happen again. And even if you go back to last year, when Kentucky had what I think was a relatively successful season, this happened throughout last year, too. First halves under Mark Pope, especially on the road, they're just terrible, and they're consistently terrible. He cannot get his team to play, to come out ready to play on the road against good teams. He just can't really against any teams. Forget about good teams against any team. They do not play well in the first half on the road. They struggle sometimes at home, too, but they always struggle on the road. That's just not a sign of a good preparation. It's just not. And you know, part of me sits back and says, when Mark got hired, I went back and looked at his time at byu, and it feels like. It feels like a lot of the stuff that we saw when he was at BYU is also true here. I guess I thought he would kind of grow out of some of it, but when he was at byu, he would get wins that you never thought he could get. I remember he won once at Kansas in a really impressive game a year. Kansas was like, number one or two in the country. He would get these wins that he had no business getting, but then he would lose by, like, 30 to Central Florida. And you would say, what? And we're seeing some of that here. When Mark gets beat, they don't just get beat. I mean, they get pounded. And that's kind of what happened today, this game tonight. You know, I'm gonna have to respectfully disagree with my friend Jimmy Dykes, who I think said in the second half something like, you know, Kentucky's down 20, but they've played really hard. I just. I don't believe that. I don't think they played hard. Didn't sound like Mark Pope did either. As a matter of fact, Mark was seemingly pretty critical the of the way that they've played. Here's what he said just to Tom Leach just a few minutes ago. We need to engage our team in the game. That's been a space where we've been fighting a difficult battle all year long to get our guys to embrace this idea of being incredibly physical and forceful during a game. I mean, that's another way of saying our guys don't compete the whole game. And I think that's true. This is a team that has a pretty amazing ability to fight back sometimes, but they also have an ability to just have stretches of just not giving effort, and that's what Happened tonight. Yes, they shot poorly. Yes, they took bad shots, but they also played no defense. You heard Jack Givens say that he really didn't think anybody except Diabate wanted to play defense. I think there's a lot of, A lot of truth to that. They got crushed in transition. Did. Never got back. And then offensively, the reality is if we don't get points in transition and if we don't get ball movement, we're just not good. If you play a game in the half court and you can keep Kentucky in the half court and you limit and you just stay on your man and guard one on one, we're not Good. We had 45 points. What did away and Aberdeen have 38 of the 35, 35 of the 50. At one point it was 35 of 50, you know, and those guys look always been good in SEC play. Aberdeen's been better. But like, I mean, they're not. They. They cannot score over, you know, 60, 60% of your points. You're not going to win. 65, 70%. I mean, you're not going to. You are not going to win in that scenario. We got out physical by a team that's not very physical. The way you beat Vandy's on the glass, they crushed us. Everything you need to do to win this game, you just didn't do. Now, I can sit there and whine about it all day, but it's extremely annoying. And the thing is, games like this are miserable to watch. I mean, most of you, a lot of you are probably listening to this podcast on your way to work tomorrow morning because you went and you might not have even made it through the end of the game. I. Billy, during the second half, read a book with the game on the back.