The 3-2-1: Why are so many pundits sleeping on Kentucky basketball?

During the football regular season the Cats Illustrated 3-2-1 belonged to Mark Stoops' program. Here we shift gears and shine the spotlight on John Calipari's bunch, which is benefitting from more practice time and a slower game schedule.

As usual, the format is as follows: Three things we've learned, two things we're asking, one bold prediction.

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When P.J. Washington is good, he can be really good.

That's not a revelation, or it shouldn't be. But you could be forgiven if you had started to ask whether Kentucky would see much of Washington's best this year. After all, it's been a rocky start for Washington in 2017, and that's putting it mildly. Though Washington's father told Cats Illustrated's T.J. Walker that he was confident that his son would iron out whatever issues were causing him to struggle, and Washington has seemed to shrug his early struggles off as things that would pass with time, the freshman had been lackadaisical with the basketball and struggled on both ends in many of Kentucky's first games.

John Calipari has talked about his insistence that Washington needed to drop some excess weight. Washington did that and, Calipari believes, it's already paying off.

"He was good. Look, I come back to this and I've always tried to be this guy: Individual players have got to improve before your team can get better," Calipari said after the Monmouth game. "So, PJ lost that weight and then all of a sudden he doesn't even look like the same guy. I wasn't sure if it would be this game, but he had practiced this way."

For Kentucky to become a bona fide national championship contender, that's the kind of Washington that needs to show up most times out.

This team is better than a lot of the pundits seem to think.

When ESPN's Jay Bilas was calling a Kentucky game recently, there was no flash of light or mountaintop moment in the game that signaled an about face. But Bilas had, all season long prior to that, largely framed this Wildcat basketball team as one with talent, exceptional rawness and a step down from previous Calipari teams. That probably wasn't unfair in most respects, but it's noteworthy because he gradually, almost subtly, started to talk about the team's improvement and how they'll be "really good" later in the year.

Still, it seems like the national pundit opinion beyond that has been very slow to change, even as Kentucky's play has improved on the court.

Turnovers are lingering as an issue. P.J. Washington, for all the good against Monmouth, still hasn't proven he can be counted on game in, game out, as a strong producer. Jarred Vanderbilt's status is uncertain. This team is winning by wider margins than earlier in the year, but they still aren't getting the kind of distance Kentucky fans are accustomed to.

Given all that, the improvement should be obvious to anyone paying attention. So if the narrative hasn't changed - and that narrative has largely been a lazy comparison of this year's team and Calipari's highest-achieving teams - are people really paying attention?

Calipari would seem to agree with that.

"Today, I told the guys prior to, I'm a little disappointed that the kids aren't getting the respect, I think, they deserve, as players," Calipari said on Saturday. "Again, I've done this 30-some years, I know one player from another, and I don't know if it's people's opinion or their hope that this guy's not that good and this guy's not – I mean, what? And we're just getting going. I mean, this team is just – there were some things we did in the first half that you would think, 'Wow, we've cracked through.' Well, we really haven't, but we're getting in that direction. We're trending the right way."

Tests get tougher from here, but Cats will be solid favorites in last three non-conference games before SEC play.

Before the season this next three-game stretch against Virginia Tech, UCLA and Louisville seemed like it would really test Kentucky. But time has revealed that Kentucky's non-conference schedule (mostly through little fault of the Wildcats' own planning) is really quite poor this year.

Kentucky lost to Kansas, but Kansas is clearly down a notch this year. The Wildcats haven't played anyone beyond that yet.

Virginia Tech is 9-1 and seems to be back on track after a bad loss to a mediocre Saint Louis team, but it's hard to tell how "real" the Hokie resurgence is because it has come against lackluster competition.

UCLA, a Top 25 team in the preseason for all of its losses, has struggled in 2017-18, with the sideshow in China and early losses to Creighton and Michigan plus close calls against Georgia Tech, Central Arkansas and a very questionable Wisconsin team.

Then there's Louisville, whose sideshow has dwarfed all others. The Cardinals haven't exactly seen the bottom fall out, but they've left something to be desired and have not been the kind of team a lot of people believed they could be before the season.

Kentucky should go 3-0 leading into SEC play, but that might not tell us a whole lot about the Wildcats, either.

Will this Kentucky team be able to survive a Kevin Knox "dud" performance against quality opposition?

Knox picked a good time to have his worst game of the season to date. While five Wildcats scored in double-digits against Monmouth in the Garden, Knox was not one of them. Knox had been averaging close to 17 points per game going into Saturday's contest. He's now down to 15.2 per after shooting a woeful 1/9 with seven turnovers. Shooting that poorly is one thing. Shooting that poorly and turning it over seven times seems a little bit flukish. There have been other times this year when Knox has been a little sloppy with the ball, but Saturday's game was what it looked like when the wheels come off for a talented freshman who seemed determined to remind everyone that he's still, you know, a freshman.

Kentucky thrived offensively with Knox struggling, largely because of Washington and Diallo but because of a balanced, efficient attack.

But can Kentucky succeed if Knox plays even close to that poorly against a good team, like Florida, Texas A&M or Alabama? Fortunately, he won't play that poorly very often. It's just a question we've got to ask when we're talking about a sport that comes down to a March six-game sprint that doesn't offer mulligans.

In the short term, Calipari isn't worried. In fact, he sees a silver lining.

"It's good for the soul to go 1 for 9," he said. "Now, what you would learn, if you go 1 for 5 would you shoot jumpers or just keep going to the basket until they foul you and get baskets? Or you end up going 1 for 9, which is what he did. It's a great lesson for him."

Are turnovers going to plague this team all season?

It's probably too early to say yes, definitively, but the Wildcats have been flat out bad when it comes to playing crisp basketball and avoiding turnovers. That has been an emphasis for Calipari, and in spite of all the many good things his team did in New York City, they still handed it over 19 times.

"We still had 19 turnovers, and my guess is 10 or 12 of them were unforced," Calipari said. "They're not even forced turnovers. It's not like they put us in a bad position, they were just we gave them the ball and we gotta stop it."

But the context of that is significant. Calipari wasn't dejected or dwelling on that number. He saw progress in other areas and that was his focus. And if the team can clean up in other areas, why not in the turnover category?

Part of the problem, Calipari noted, was a complacency that set in when Kentucky enjoyed a little prosperity early.

"We started the second half – you ready? – no pass, shot; no pass, shot; one pass, shot; no pass, shot. And they had visions of being back in Vegas in the AAU," he said.

By tournament time, people will be talking about Kentucky as a championship contender.

That's a fair take because the team is better than they have been credit for in the national media but also because the early part of the season has reminded us (shocker) that college basketball is still a wide open sport, this year as much as ever.

Duke sure has looked good but the Blue Devils' defense has left something to be desired and they dropped a game against Boston College. Road game or not, young Duke team or not, strong performance by the Eagles or not, if you're losing to Boston College you can't be penciled in as the champion in waiting.

Arizona seems to be getting things back on track. Texas A&M and Florida will still be bears in the SEC. But this does not seem to be one of the stronger years "at the top" on the national landscape, and that benefits a team like Kentucky, which really is still a huge work in progress but does have talent and is farther along than people believe.