It is likely that Indiana coach Tom Crean and Kentucky coach John Calipari will never hold hands and sing “Kumbaya.” Certainly Bob Knight would have to use Purell.
With several schools jumping ship to new conferences, it seems the one staple of college basketball would be the Indiana vs. Kentucky rivalry.
But last Thursday the schools announced that the rivalry would be severed. This is a situation that must be addressed and sewn up quickly.
Both coaches clearly have their own prerogatives in terms of the direction of the series that has been played every year since 1969.
Calipari wants the series to continue only if it is moved to an off campus site. But Crean says moving the series to an off campus site will hurt the students and season ticket holders. This may be a good PR move by the Hoosiers, but busing students to a game is not practical.
Indiana’s athletic department is simply not going to pay to bus 8,000 students to Indianapolis or Louisville. If the students want to go to the game they will find a way there, even if it means pulling a Breaking Away and drafting behind a semi truck on a bike.
In reality, moving the game off campus is only a ploy to bring in more revenue from the big wigs in Indianapolis and not a service to season ticket holders and students.
If the series moves off campus, Indiana will instead have to seek the “students” from Eli Lilly in Indianapolis.
The Wildcats’ hope to move the series makes sense because they would receive more money from ticket revenue, which is the trend of college basketball. However it is a head scratcher since Kentucky is slated to host the game this year.
Big Blue Nation would love nothing more than to beat the Hoosiers at home after Christian Watford’s buzzer beater ruined the Wildcats’ perfect season.
Both of these teams have the basketball pedigree and lore that should warrant the continuation of this series.
Certainly there were great crowds at Freedom Hall and the RCA Dome when the game was played off campus from 1991 to 2005, however nothing compares to two of the greatest cathedrals college basketball has to offer.
Playing the game at Lucas Oil Stadium or the KFC Yum! Center would lose the charm of the rivalry. If the rivalry was once again moved, Indiana students could not get to game 10 hours early in order to be there when Kentucky warmed up or chant “S-A-T” when Calipari is introduced.
Indiana and Kentucky can go the route of many big time programs that make changes for money, or they can rely on the roots of tradition to tell the story.
Now that both programs, which have combined for 13 national championships, are again relevant on the national stage, this is the last thing the rivalry needs.
This is not only a non-conference game, this is a matchup between two of college basketball’s marquee programs in arguably the two biggest basketball states in the country. They use each other as a measuring stick.
There are several memories of this series that make it so hard to believe they will be buried in the past. From Mike Davis voraciously running onto the court in 2002 to the feuds between Knight and Eddie Sutton, college basketball will miss a lot of memories.
This rivalry doesn’t need the big time glamour of off campus sites, it thrives on the students and fans on both sides. Indiana Athletics Director Fred Glass and Kentucky’s Mitch Barnhart need take that into consideration and put their thinking caps on so the last memory of this series is not of it being discontinued.
Knight said it best in the Bloomington Herald Times in 1993.
"Failure, to me, is not having the desire to try. Having the desire to try
is in its own way success."
