Kentucky Wildcats 79, Georgia Bulldogs 49: The Instantaneous Ill-Informed Roundball Wrapup

When the Georgia Bulldogs traveled to Lexington to take on the top-ranked Kentucky Wildcats on Thursday night, Glenn Logan gave the Fox Hounds no better than a 10 per cent chance, and I may have been even less sanguine than that. No one, though, was prepared to see such a complete clobbering; in a game that would have been halted had it been a softball game or a heavyweight fight, Kentucky put a 79-49 skunking on Georgia that Ajax wouldn’t take off.

The Wildcats took the lead 25 seconds into the contest, and Kentucky was up, 7-0, 61 seconds later. Though the Bulldogs cut the lead to three on a pair of free throws and a layup, all by Gerald Robinson, the Blue and White thereafter went on a run to make it 22-9 with just under eight and a half minutes to play in the opening half.

Kentucky went to the locker room leading by a 37-19 margin that told no lies. In the first 20 minutes, the Wildcats hit more than 40 per cent of their shots from the field (13 of 31) and more than 45 per cent of their shots from three-point range (6 of 13). Georgia, meanwhile, drained two-pointers at worse than a 30 per cent clip (8 of 28) and made exactly none of their ten trey tries in the first half.

Though there were instances of athleticism put on display by the Athenians, the bottom line is that that sort of thing is what happens when a team for whom Kentavious Caldwell-Pope represents the only McDonald’s All-American to sign with the program out of high school in the last two decades meets a team that put six such superstars on the court in the first half alone. (No, I’m not exaggerating: Anthony Davis, Terrence Jones, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Doron Lamb, Marquis Teague, and Kyle Wiltjer all earned that distinction.) With that kind of otherworldly depth, it’s no wonder the Wildcat reserves outscored the Bulldog bench, 15-5, prior to intermission.

Matters were no different in the thoroughly superfluous second half. 74 seconds in, Kentucky led by the selfsame 42-21 margin one would hope to see Georgia leading by at a similar juncture in a game between these two universities’ football teams. Another score better suited to the gridiron than to the hardwood was on display with 14:28 showing on the game clock, as the Blue and White then led by a 49-28 tally.

After that, the scores went from football-friendly to downright absurd, rapidly spiraling out of control until it felt, really, like this was as bad as it possibly could get. There are not words adequate to describe the magnitude of this can-kicking; it suffices to say that, tonight, a very good team met a pretty bad team, and it showed.

Go ‘Dawgs!

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