State of Kentucky enters new era of basketball glory

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By David Schuh | Managing editor

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UK and the University of Louisville have fielded many great teams throughout their storied basketball histories.

With 11 combined national championships, they have garnered enough acclaim to establish what many believe to be the most decorated basketball state in America.

But in 2013, we could be in the midst of the state of Kentucky’s greatest era ever.

Think back to the two schools’ greatest periods prior to 2009. UK’s was probably the 1940s and ‘50s, though, they had a great deal of success in the ‘90s as well. Louisville went to four Final Fours in the 1980s, a decade in which UK reached just one.

The pattern throughout history has been that when UK is good, Louisville isn’t, and vice versa.

Now look at the two programs today.

Since John Calipari took the UK head coaching job in 2009, he has led the Cats to two Final Fours, an Elite Eight and a national championship.

Eighty miles west, Rick Pitino has accumulated the same feats at Louisville in the same time frame.

The Cats and Cardinals have won the last two national championships, only the fifth time in history that two different schools from the same state have won consecutive titles.

All that together  proves that we’re seeing one of the most dominant periods of basketball in the history of Kentucky.

And let’s not stop there.

Division II Bellarmine University won the 2011 national championship and has spent much of the last four years comfortably ranked in the top 5.

Morehead State University and Murray State University, which have never won more than one game in the NCAA Tournament, each had a player chosen in the NBA Draft in the last three years.

Northern Kentucky University, which lost back-to-back Division II national championship games in the mid-1990s, just made the jump to Division I last year. They surprised a lot of people by winning 11 games in their inaugural season in Division I playing against college basketball’s best competition.

Yes, the last four years may be the best-shared period for UK and Louisville. But the state of Kentucky is seeing a level of collective success since 2009 that it maybe never has before.

I’m not correlating this to Calipari’s arrival in Lexington. He has drastically increased the success at UK from the Billy Gillispie era, but that hasn’t sparked the same improvement among other Kentucky universities.

Simply put, the talent across the board is at a more consistent level than ever before.

Kentucky has always been regarded as one of the two or three best basketball states in the country. Only North Carolina and Indiana have valid arguments against it.

Yet, given all that history, the Calipari-Pitino era just might be the golden age in Bluegrass basketball.