When the Connecticut Huskies won their sixth NCAA Championship at the Final Four in Arizona, there followed plenty of conversation about whether UConn had transformed itself into a college basketball “blueblood” or “blue blood” or whatever the proper linguistic construction of that term might be.
What no one discussed at all: What does it mean to be a blueblood in 2024?
Is there a tangible value, something that can be converted into athletic success?
It certainly means if you hold a public event in your playing arena to introduce your new head men’s basketball coach, who happens to be the captain of the greatest team in the history of your program, and maybe the history of anyone’s program, there’s a chance you’ll attract more than 20,000 fans who want to be part of the occasion.
Mark Pope arrives at Rupp, carrying the 1996 national championship trophy 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/RJxYT9DaKI
— The Field of 68 (@TheFieldOf68) April 14, 2024
It does not mean the coach you hire will have won an NCAA Tournament game. When North Carolina hired Hubert Davis to succeed Hall of Famer Roy Williams in 2021, his career record was 0-0. When Duke appointed Jon Scheyer as the successor to the great Mike Krzyzewski, he never had been a head coach, either. Kentucky went shopping in the luxury aisle for a few days after John Calipari’s departure for Arkansas created an opening for a new Wildcats coach; before the week was out, the administration realized its choice also would need to be someone rising in the game rather than someone who had arrived. UK selected Mark Pope of BYU.
MORE: Mark Pope's coaching road leads back to UK
There is plenty of doubt whether all of that translates to consistent championship-level success in the modern game, and even more so whether Big Blue Nation is willing to cope with potentially a new reality.
If ever we could, we can’t be assured the biggest names will produce annual success. Kansas couldn’t field five quality high-major players for much of the 2023-24 season. They were a four-man team for the first two months, until forward Johnny Furphy broke through with a 33-minute, 15-point performance Jan. 16 against Oklahoma State. That lasted through Feb. 5, after which wing Kevin McCullar was bothered by a knee injury and missed eight of their final 11 games. KU exited meekly from the Big 12 Tournament and the NCAAs. The year before, Kansas had an enormously successful regular season but predictably was eliminated early from the NCAAs because they were trying to get by with a 6-7 center.
North Carolina went from an overwhelmed first-round NCAA Tournament loser in 2021 to the national championship game a year later to missing March Madness in 2023 to a No. 1 seed and Sweet 16 exit. Duke? Missed the tournament, reached the Final Four, departed from the second round and then fell in the Elite Eight to an 11 seed.
The pattern is there is no pattern.
It’s apparent from the successes achieved by those programs in that period there still is value in the brands. If we add in Kentucky’s missed 2021 tournament, first-round exits to double-digit seeds in 2022 and 2024 and a second-round elimination in 2023, it’s also possible there’s not been a period of less consistency for those four at any point in the expanded bracket era. Using the Elite Eight as a measuring stick, the only tournaments none of the four programs reached a regional final have been 2006, 2021 and 2023. And no four-year period has had as few as the four participants that have made it from 2021-24.
There is little doubt Kentucky basketball features an unparalleled degree of passion and engagement among its fan base. It’s there in every arena the Wildcats visit, from neutral-court venues such as the Champions Classic to conference road games to the SEC Tournament to the NCAAs. It’s also apparent, though, in their widespread angst regarding the program’s March struggles this decade.
What is the formula for championship-level success in the portal/NIL era? We have been warned teams needed to be “old”, and yet UConn started two sophomores and a freshman in the title game against Purdue, and the Boilers started three sophomores. That doesn’t seem old, at all.
We’ve been told teams need to dominate the transfer portal to excel. Purdue deployed one transfer in its rotation, UConn three. But NC State’s entire rotation comprised transfer recruits. Alabama had five players among the seven in its Final Four rotation who began their careers at different colleges.
When the path to success is so obscured, even those with power, wealth and fame have their vision encumbered.
That’s why it was inevitable Kentucky would not land any of those big-name coaches immediately proposed by so many in the fan base and media. Nate Oats knows what he has at Alabama. He was able to construct teams good enough to earn the No. 1 overall seed for the 2023 NCAA Tournament and reach the Final Four a year later. He has the support of his administration and appreciation in the form of a contract extension that soon may place him among the three highest-paid coaches.
What is the advantage of coaching at Kentucky?
The disadvantage was obvious as the Wildcats’ alleged NCAA Tournament “drought” was chronicled prior to their first-round victory over Providence in 2023. Think about it: There were calculations presented of the number of days between the Wildcats’ overtime loss in the 2019 Elite Eight and that afternoon in Winston-Salem last March. In between, UK won the 2019-20 Southeastern Conference by a margin of three games but saw the postseason canceled because of the pandemic, suffered a losing season in the COVID year of 2021 and earned a No. 2 seed but was upset by Saint Peter’s in the 2022 first round.
When the 2021 NCAA Tournament began, it had been 709 days since anyone had won a March Madness game. But who other than Kentucky was being harangued for all of this?
Given the uncertainty regarding the power of the blueblood programs in this era, there was not sufficient reason for Oats or Scott Drew or Dan Hurley to put his happiness at risk. There were millions of reasons for Pope to give it a shot, and he very well may succeed, so long as he constructs a staff that recruits successfully and is able to manage the extraordinary demands upon whomever occupies the Kentucky head coach’s office faces.
The pressure is great for the person in charge of the Wildcats.
So can be the reward. No longer is it anywhere close to assured.
