Our tale of winter woe in the commonwealth of Kentucky actually begins outside state lines. It begins just across the Ohio River from Louisville, in Clarksville, Ind., at a boxy building along Eastern Boulevard’s gritty business strip. It begins at Winner’s Circle Race Sports Pub.
With no legal sports wagering other than horse racing in Kentucky, the parking lot at Winner’s Circle is populated by license plates from the south side of the river. Business is fairly slow on a weekday afternoon, other than the people monitoring the feeds from race tracks across the country. “Dig in, Seven!” one man bellows at a TV screen showing a race from Mahoning Valley, a racino in Youngstown, Ohio. “Dig in!” Judging from the silence that follows the stretch run, the No. 7 horse did not sufficiently dig in.
At night, when the college basketball schedule tips off, business picks up appreciably. “If there were rabbits playing basketball and there was a line on it,” says daytime manager Monte Mattingly, “people would bet it.”
On days when the Louisville Cardinals play just 3.5 miles away at the KFC Yum! Center, their fans stream into Winner’s Circle to place bets—against their team. Mattingly estimated that wagers this season have run from 80% to 85% against Louisville. “They’re wearing their Louisville stuff and betting against Louisville,” he says.
It’s come to this for a fan base that lives and dies with the Cardinals: mitigating its misery by trying to turn a consolation profit. From the moment Louisville lost an exhibition game by 10 points against a Division II opponent Oct. 30, appalled fans realized what Las Vegas did not—their favorite team is absolutely awful.
The Cards are a brutal 2–17 overall, 5-13-1 against the spread. They failed to come close to covering in their first nine games of the season, when the betting lines were wildly off. It took oddsmakers a month to wrap their minds—and their line-setting algorithms—around a blueblood program plummeting to a historic low.
But this crash is not solely a Louisville problem within the commonwealth. The possibility exists that none of the seven Division I men’s basketball programs from the state of Kentucky will make the 68-team NCAA tournament. Last time they held the Big Dance without the commonwealth, it was a little dance of 25 teams. The year was 1963.
The state is staring at a once-in-60-years basketball calamity.
Seventy-five miles east on Interstate 64, in Lexington, Kentucky’s fan base has gone from cocky to shocked to furious to a renewed flicker of hope. It has taken a current three-game winning streak to get the Wildcats (13–6, 4–3 in the Southeastern Conference) on the right side of the NCAA tournament bubble in many mock brackets, and just barely. No one in Big Blue Nation expected a team that began the season No. 1 in the Pomeroy Ratings and No. 4 in the AP Top 25 to currently be outside the top 30 in the former and unranked in the latter.
The other schools are in flux, at best. Western Kentucky, which entered the season in the top 15 in all-time victories, has flailed to an 11–9 record (3–6 in conference play) with coach Rick Stansbury missing nearly half the season thus far for health reasons. Murray State, a perennial mid-major power, is finding the adjustment to the Missouri Valley Conference rather challenging—the Racers are 11–9 overall and 6–4 in the league. Morehead State (12–9) hasn’t taken advantage of the defection of several programs from the Ohio Valley Conference. A season removed from winning the Atlantic Sun Conference tournament, Bellarmine (9–12) is rebuilding. The only two teams currently in solid contention for their conference regular-season titles are Northern Kentucky (12–8, 8–2 and tied for first in the Horizon League) and Eastern Kentucky (13–8, 6–2 in the A-Sun).
The state hasn’t been shut out of the tournament since 1963 for a reason—people within it care too much. More than any other state, in fact. Indiana and North Carolina are deeply invested, but they also have professional sports franchises. For better or worse, college basketball pro basketball in Kentucky, and has been for decades.
Basketball has been baked into the culture for about a century. It is the state’s bonding element during the gray months when midwestern winter creeps below the Mason-Dixon Line. Social calendars and family functions revolve around tipoff times. The gyms are cathedrals that call the faithful to regularly scheduled reverence.
Kentucky has the second-biggest arena in college basketball, with a listed capacity of 23,000. Louisville is third (22,090). When both are playing at home on the same day and the seats are full, as they used to be during happier times, roughly one percent of the state’s population of 4.5 million is in attendance.
When the teams aren’t playing home games, the fans are glued to their TV sets. The city of Louisville is to college basketball Nielsen Ratings what Birmingham is to college football—the annual national leader by a wide margin. In 2017, for example, when Louisville was ESPN’s highest-rated market for college hoops for the 15th straight year, its average viewership more than doubled runner-up Raleigh-Durham and third-place Kansas City.
That rabid populace has demanded excellence from its teams and reliably gotten it. Only UCLA has won more than Kentucky’s eight national championships. Louisville is one of just nine programs to have won three or more titles (give or take the 2013 crown the NCAA vacated for rules violations). The Wildcats, Cardinals and Western Kentucky have combined for 28 Final Fours (with a couple of those by Louisville vacated, as well). The state’s D-I programs have made a total of 162 appearances in the history of the tourney.
Seeing multiple teams from the commonwealth in the bracket has been a Selection Sunday tradition spanning the majority of the citizenry’s lifetime. And now, that annual rite is stunningly uncertain.
“It’s unthinkably bad,” says Rick Bozich of WDRB.com in Louisville, a veteran of more than 40 years covering college basketball in the state. “I didn’t think they could have an NCAA Tournament without any teams from Kentucky.”