'We're not a Cinderella'
Oakland sends Kentucky spiraling, and other thoughts on every game of the tournament's first day
At the end of their first postgame interview, having sent No. 4 seed Kentucky reeling, Oakland coach Greg Kampe and Oakland star Jack Gohlke were about to walk away from a reporter’s microphone when suddenly, ominously, Gohlke grabbed the mic and leaned in.
“We are not a Cinderella,” he said. He was dead serious. Kampe laughed.
Of course Kampe laughed. Of course Oakland is a Cinderella. It’s a small commuter school in suburban Detroit that gained Division I status in 1999, reached the NCAA Tournament just three times before this season, won one game in this competition before. Kampe, who was hired at Oakland in 1984, has been there through all of it, knows how incredibly hard it is for a program like his to beat a program like Kentucky, and thus broke whatever kayfabe he’d been performing for his players when his DII transfer guard decided to flex on national TV.
Kampe knew: What Oakland did was totemic and unthinkable. And, for Oakland’s opponents, an epochal disaster.
Kentucky, for anyone who doesn’t know, is not the kind of place to listen to reason or logic or moderate considerations of why NCAA Tournament upsets can happen to anyone. They do not accept that the vagaries of single elimination competition mean they should shrug their shoulders at a first-round tournament loss. They do not think this is simply a period programs go through before they break out.
And they have reason: From 1988 to 2022, UK lost its first tournament game exactly once (under Billy Gillespie, ha). They’ve now done it twice in the past three years. The discussion for many Kentucky fans now — many of the same fans who were already losing faith in John Calipari — is not just about the end of a season but the end of an era.
The consensus online is that Calipari has to be fired. His buyout is $33 million. Squaring that circle is not going to be easy, but this is where Kentucky men’s basketball now finds itself.
There is nothing more frustrating for fans of a favorite than feeling like you got upset in an obvious way. Folks can understand when shots don’t fall, and they are not inclined to blame the (until recently) unpaid players. But they all think they can coach, and they detest when their anxious nightmares play out. In 2013, when Indiana had its best team in a generation, the Hoosiers’ loss to Syracuse in the Sweet 16 — when Indiana played like it had never heard of the idea of a 2-3 zone, let alone considered that Syracuse might deploy one, and a particularly nasty version at that — effectively poisoned the well for Tom Crean permanently.
Kentucky did a version of this Thursday night. The Wildcats were just atrocious defensively, a season-long habit that unsurprisingly cost them in the end. In particular, their approach to guarding Golhke was laughable. Gohlke is the most extreme of gunners; he has still attempted exactly eight 2-point field goals all season. The number of open looks at 3 he got in the first half suggested a team not entirely prepared to run off a person who literally only every shoots 3s; the number of looks he continued to get after starting hot and getting the crowd behind the underdog necessitated a series of hard screen coverages and double teams that never came. Golhke finished with 32 points on 10-of-20 from 3. (He attempted zero field goals and went 2-of-3 from the free throw line.)
Meanwhile, on offense, Kentucky plum froze. The zone truly freaked them out. Rob Dillingham and Reed Sheppard, so dynamic all season, were horrified to do something wrong. Sheppard, a 50 percent 3-point shooter, made exactly one shot in 26 minutes. He and Dillingham would stand at the top of the key and stare at Oakland’s zone like they’d never seen the like before. Mostly they just looked terrified. (Only Antonio Reeves, the fifth-year senior, looked composed. But Calipari has tried the senior transfer approach in recent years and it hasn’t led to better outcomes, though Jay Wright’s view on the topic is not to be dismissed.)
Anyway: The upshot for Oakland is another two days of tournament existence, the chance to be heroes, a story for the ages. For Kentucky, it is about how eager the fans and the school are to end an undeniably successful, but also clearly flagging, era in the program’s history.
We’re not a Cinderella. Yeah, man, you are. But maybe, thanks in no small part to your opponent, not quite as much of one as we all thought.
No. 9 Michigan State 69, No. 8 Mississippi State 51
Here we go again. All season — and especially during the height of Bubble Watch — no team has been more consistently frustrating, and frankly just downright annoying, than the Michigan State Spartans. All along, the metrics have looked good; Michigan State hasn’t dipped below 20th in adjusted efficiency since the start of 2024. And all along, Michigan State underwhelmed and underperformed.
The coup de grace came in late November and early March, when the Spartans lost four of their last five, including home games to Iowa and Ohio State, and were a bucket and a half from another home loss to Northwestern March 6. (That final score was 53-49.)
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