Rowland: What's the best way to judge Kentucky's 2017-18 season?

Kentucky was favored to advance to the Elite Eight after a string of upsets seemed to open a clear path for John Calipari's 2017-18 team, but the Wildcats fell short in a close loss to Kansas State in Atlanta.

The loss is still fresh so perspective might be tough to muster, but it's officially the offseason for Kentucky basketball.

So how should we judge Kentucky's performance over the season that just passed?

Judging Kentucky based on preseason expectations is a bad idea

Kentucky was ranked, once again, in the preseason top 10 of the major polls going into the 2017-18 season. But as usual, those polls are essentially worthless and amount to guesswork that isn't informed by much except previous seasons and what pundits are projecting. For a program like Kentucky, even the most expert of experts are still largely guessing. There are some transcendent high school basketball talents whose games project, with absolute assurance, to a high level in college. But Kentucky didn't have (m)any of those players this year. They did have a lot of players who pundits believed could be good, or really good, but nobody really knew.

So if you're looking at Kentucky towards the top 5 of preseason polls and concluding that a Sweet 16 finish is underachieving, I'd suggest that perhaps John Calipari's team was the "default" top 5/10 choice in the preseason. They're always a safe, even a good pick, because of Calipari's track record, the talent they're guaranteed to have, and also the fact that you really don't look bad if you pick Kentucky to do well and they do less than their usual best.

Judging Kentucky based on their lowest lows in early February produces a more positive perspective, but this view has its weaknesses.

If you go back to early February, Kentucky had lost four consecutive games and there was increasing chatter that the Wildcats might be inching towards the bubble conversation. In hindsight that seems silly. They were a five seed, for goodness sakes. Kentucky was probably never as close to the bubble as some worry warts believed, but the potential for that fall out of the field was real. After all, in context, that was a team that had lost four straight games and had a daunting schedule still to play.

If you choose to take that four game losing streak as your starting point, Thursday's loss and a Sweet 16 finish doesn't seem nearly as disappointing. That makes perfect sense. Of course, what doesn't make perfect sense is why you would set your starting point as early February, since the season begins in November and runs through early April. So while some fans might have been thinking, "The Cats were this close to disaster and an embarrassing season, I'll take 2-1 in the Dance all day," that seems like a little bit of sunshine pumping, because most other teams aren't judged by how they fare in the tournament relative to their worst regular season moments. They're judged based on the tougher to pin down potential they're believed to possess relative to the rest of the teams in play.

Judging Kentucky based on how the team was playing at the end of the season is the closest thing to a clear-eyed perspective yet, but it stops short of some really important information.

Now we're probably getting a little closer to something really good. It makes sense to largely judge a team's tournament performance based on how they were playing at the end of the year because while the tournament is a "second season" (or a third if you count conference tournaments as a second), the games just before the Dance are the best, most concrete proof of where that team is at when it counts.

By that measure, the Sweet 16 isn't a disaster by any stretch of the imagination. ESPN's BPI gave Kentucky all of a 2-percent chance to reach the Final Four when the brackets were released. The so-called "Bracket of Death" had Kentucky facing upset-primed and red-hot Davidson, ultra-talented Arizona and No. 1 overall seed Virginia. If you had told a Kentucky fan before the tournament that their team would make it past the Round of 32, they're probably not thrilled at a Sweet 16 exit but they'd assume a nice feather in their cap from a win over DeAndre Ayton.

Aside from that road loss to Florida in the team's regular season finale, which seems like an outlier in the broader context of real, consistent improvement, Kentucky was probably playing like one of the top 10-15 teams in the country by season's end. They didn't have enough top-top tier wins for a top three seed, but Calipari could rightfully gripe that their draw was probably a little harder than it should have been ... again.

Is the Sweet 16 satisfactory to a fan base that's looking at the Kentucky that trampled Collin Sexton's Crimson Tide and then outlasted a very good Tennessee team in St. Louis? Perhaps.

Judging Kentucky based on how the team should have fared in its bracket as it actually played out is completely fair. However, it should be remembered that college basketball's postseason event is the biggest crapshoot in all of sports and no single-game result, win or loss, should usually change someone's big-picture opinion of whether a season was simply "good" or "bad."

If you told Kentucky fans, on Selection Sunday, they'd reach the Sweet 16, many would be slightly impressed if not completely fulfilled. But if you told them they would face Davidson, Buffalo and Kansas State with 11-seed Cinderella team Loyola on tap, a Sweet 16 would be viewed as quite a bit of a disappointment.

That's understandable. Kentucky was the 5-point favorite on Thursday. On paper, K-State appeared to be the underdog for a number of reasons, not least of which the fact that Kentucky was peaking at the right time and had more talent.

It's worth remembering, however, that 5-point favorites lose every day in college basketball and when it happens during the regular season it's usually not even a semi-interesting news item. It's shrugged off. Kansas State beating Kentucky in a hypothetical SEC-Big XII challenge would have made for one podcast segment on a national show but it would quickly be forgotten and cast aside as "something that happens in this sport." The tournament is no different and in fact, in this year's tournament the crazy has become more common than almost ever before.

Kentucky didn't lose to UMBC. They didn't lose to a 13-seed. They lost to an 8/9 game team that held its own in one of the nation's best conferences and played one of its better games coming off a lackluster Round of 32 performance. It really wasn't much of an upset if you believe Vegas, and you'd better believe Vegas.

That said, asking fans not to look down the road at a potential regional final against an 11-seed with a trip to the national semis on the line is an impossible task. Because so many fans had realized, rightfully, that Kentucky was the odds-on favorite to reach the Final Four, the loss to Kansas State is probably one of the more disappointing defeats of the Calipari era in Lexington. And in a sport that is so defined by its tournament, arguably more than any other sport at any other level, it was a defining game on some level.

UK's loss to KSU, thanks to the unlikely bracket results that preceded Thursday's late game in Atlanta, was for many a missed opportunity for a coveted Final Four bid, even though the teams weren't playing for the Final Four (it's still worth noting that some computer predictor models still only had Kentucky as having a 45 to 55 percent chance of winning the region going into Thursday, so it was far from a given. It was a tossup).

Taking all of the above into account: Preseason expectations (largely based on assumptions of talent and potential), how things turned out versus how bad it could have been, how the team fared after its finish to the season and how the results squared with the opportunity the bracket presented, what should we believe?

That's obviously up to each fan to decide, although I would suggest that, as always, there are some really extreme poles that don't make a lot of sense. To say it was a "bad" season or a "failure" is extreme in some respects. Missing 14 free throws in a close game was certainly bad but as far as the overall season, when the youngest team in the nation without any top 5 high school recruits and sophomores as their veterans (with no team captains) wins the SEC tournament championship in the league's best year in a long time and reaches the second weekend, that's not a bad year. Not even at Kentucky, where contrary to what some believe, most fans realize titles are rare and even Final Fours are tough to come by.

On the other extreme would be the suggestion that the season was an unqualified success. The only real rationale for that would be if the person had become crippled with fear in February and would have locked into anything respectable if given the chance. Or, someone might point to the team's youth and their deficiencies and say something like, "In an age of the three-point shot this was the youngest team in the country and a team that simply couldn't produce from outside, plus Jarred Vanderbilt only played sporadically and Jemarl Baker never saw the court." Even in that context it's really tough to overlook the reality that Kentucky was a really good team at the end of the year and should have beaten Kansas State in front of a pro-Kentucky crowd. The Kansas State game was the most important game of the season - because they lost it.

My opinion is that Kentucky finished pretty much where I picked them to finish before the season (I said the Sweet 16). In terms of talent, length and athleticism they were obviously in basically a league of their own with one or two peers, but they faced a schedule full of 21-year olds who could shoot from deep and often had deeper rosters. So, overall, when I think about the Sweet 16 for this team it's neither a positive or a negative. It just is. If they had defeated Kansas State, the odds they would have won a national championship would have improved ever-so-slightly but it still would have been unlikely. At the same time, the Final Four is a huge achievement and while some Kentucky fans are annoyed at the pundit class persistently pointing it out so as to demean these Wildcats' accomplishments, it really is true that the road to San Antonio was exceptionally manageable. In fact, it might be a very, very long time before Kentucky sees a series of postseason breaks even close to that.

I've always believed that postseason losses are easier to stomach if the game was lost in a way that makes you think, "Yeah, I could/should have seen that coming." It's why I feel like, even aside from the pursuit of 40-0, the 2015 team's loss to Wisconsin was a bigger gut punch than the 2010 loss to West Virginia. In the latter case, it really wasn't shocking that they would shoot poorly from outside and lose to a good, older team. While the '15 team's loss to Wisconsin wasn't "shocking" (it certainly was a huge story) or a monster upset, it would be tough to come to grips with because that team didn't have the glaring weaknesses that created a soft underbelly of vulnerability.

That P.J. Washington would be ice cold from the free throw line to that extent was surprising, but that had been an issue for him in the past. And they didn't get get enough help from behind the arc. They were 3-7 in games when shooting less than 30-percent from deep. Make it 3-8. That makes the loss a little easier to digest, I'd imagine, because everyone should have known that in a six-game tournament against good teams, the odds were it would bite them at some point.

I've always believed that the 2017-18 season will be judged by history not so much by what the team accomplished that year, but by whether it was a "set up" year to a much more dominant 2018-19, or whether it proves to be one of two consecutive "reset" years after the 2017 Elite Eight.

With Kevin Knox all but gone, heavy chatter than Shai Gilgeous-Alexander will be as well and legitimate speculation about what some other Wildcats might do (remember, it's not about what a fan thinks they should do, it's about what they want to/will do), we have no idea whether '17-18 was a set up year to a potential 9th championship or an isolated occurrence.

If Hamidou Diallo, P.J. Washington, Wenyen Gabriel, Quade Green and (God forbid, America) Gilgeous-Alexander return, to complement another stellar incoming class, then this year's Sweet 16 takes on a different feel. But if more leave than probably should, or than would be ideal for the program's success, it will be hard not to think more and more about the missed opportunity against Kansas State.

Come to think of it, the way I'd judge Kentucky's '17-18 basketball season is just about exactly the same way I'd judge Kentucky's 2017 football season. If you look at the personnel, the talent, the depth, the schedule, the skill and the whole picture, 7-6 (football) and the Sweet 16 (basketball) is probably right in line with where they should have been, give or take a game or round. But if you consider the circumstances - the missed free throws, the bracket breaks, the Florida streak and collapse - it's impossible not to dwell a little on what might have been.