When the Kentucky Wildcats dropped out of the rankings for the first time this season and traveled to play at West Virginia that weekend, no one believed they would win. 

Fast forward three weeks and the Cats are in a similar situation in facing the top team in the SEC, and Kentucky has a similar mindset heading into its game against Auburn. 

“This is a great opportunity for us to go into a hostile environment, bunch of young players, freshmen and sophomores, and go steal one,” assistant head coach Kenny Payne said in a Tuesday press conference. “That’s the game plan.”

The Cats are in desperate need of a win, as they’re currently on a three-game losing streak, the longest losing streak of the John Calipari era.

Preview: UK looks to end slump at Auburn 

A game at No. 10 Auburn’s home court might be the most difficult place to steal a win at this moment, but that doesn’t mean the Cats are shying away from the opportunity. 

“Who don’t like it? You playing basketball,” freshman guard Quade Green said. “Waking up, going out to play the game that you love and you going into a hostile environment, you got to love it.”

If the Cats hope to pull off the upset, they will need to do what John Calipari refers as “playing a full 40-minute basketball game.”

The Cats have yet to do that, as many times in recent games they let opponents go on lengthy runs that often put the game out of reach for UK. Payne thinks in order for UK to win, they need to cut out those droughts of scoring. 

“There’s four, five six minute stretches in games where we’re not producing, where we go four minutes without a basket, where we go five minutes and they score seven out of eight possessions,” Payne said. “We’re not good enough to make that up.” 

The players also agree that they aren’t good enough to take off four to six minutes a game.

“You’ve seen it multiple times, we’re not good enough to let any team to just come out and score a bunch of baskets on us, hit a bunch of shots and think that were going to be able to play our way back every game, we’re just not that good,” freshman guard Hamidou Diallo said.

Playing a full 40-minute game is one of the issues UK needs to fix before they become a threat in postseason play. However, they have been working to resolve those problems, and believe they could turn the season around as early as Wednesday’s game. 

“Starting tomorrow, we going to get rid of it (the struggles),” Green said.