Kentucky May Be Fried

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Head coach John Calipari of the Kentucky Wildcats

The prevailing wisdom before this men's college basketball season was that Kentucky men's basketball coach John Calipari had figured out a way to beat the game. The Wildcats went 38-2 last season and won the national title, only to reload with another class of freakishly precocious freshmen to whom Lexington is merely a pit stop before packing off to the NBA.

Then the season started.

More than halfway through this year's college basketball campaign, those of us who predicted back-to-back titles for the Wildcats don't have egg on our faces so much as Western omelets with a side of hash browns and bacon. After losing to Alabama Tuesday, Kentucky fell to 12-6 and its NCAA tournament bid is in jeopardy. Calipari's squad doesn't have a win against a team ranked in the top 50 of the Rating Percentage Index, a metric used in NCAA tournament selection. Against top-100 RPI teams, the Wildcats are 1-6, with their one win coming in the first game of the season.

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The rest of Kentucky's schedule brings both good and bad news. The good news is that the Southeastern Conference is only the seventh-best league in the country this year, according to kenpom.com, a basketball statistics website. That means there are plenty of winnable games left.

The bad news: Just six of Kentucky's last 13 games are against RPI top-100 teams—and the Wildcats may have to win most of them just to be in the bracket. Not that this particular pack of Wildcats remembers what that's like: None of the players in Kentucky's starting lineup played on last season's championship team.

A version of this article appeared January 23, 2013, on page D5 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Kentucky May Be Fried.