Thread: Kentucky's Biggest Rival?

For me its a toss up between loserville and tennessee

I choice Duke, the reasoning is because of the fact it is a cold war between the wildcats and the Blue Devils. We meat once every 10 years it seems, and with us meeting next season it will be talked about all summer especially when the cats win the national title. But I hate Duke more then I hate UL.

For me it is and always will be Duke. We owe them much payback.

To put it bluntly, I'd rather stop watching basketball altogether than cheer for Louisville.

Louisville is Kentucky's biggest rival by far. It's for bagging rights for the state. Homes are divided on that day. But I will say if the question would have been, which team does Kentucky have the most hatred towards, the answer would have been duke.

I dont have to watch a Laettner winning buzzer beater in a UofL uniform year after year before the games during March madness, the uniform in the replay is Duke, and I want to pay them back bad.

I have to say North Carolina, over all the rest offered here..UofL is no longer the game it once was, UK has takin total control of the match up over the last 10 to 15 years. If not for Rick Pitino the game would just fade away in my opinion. The game doesn't mean anything on the national stage. It can not compare to the games with North Carolina, or Kansas. Hell Florida is a bigger game than the UofL game is these days. If I had my way, they would stop putting UofL on the schedule year after year. If they ( UK) must play in state schools, why does UofL get to be on the schedule every year, and not Murray State..I say play them all, 1 at a time, sit down, put all the schools in a pot, draw the names out, and play them in that order.....As you can tell, I hate UofL, and anyone who is a UofL fan, I have no respect for as a basketball fan.....I love one team only, and thats the Wildcats of Kentucky. UofL can and its fans can east $h!t and die..

it's interesting to not see the Hoosiers (which means rednecks if you're from St Louis) on the poll.

go cats!

I think our biggest rival socially is Louisville, in the game i would have to UNC or Florida.

Originally Posted by JCCAT

While out of conference scheduling has it's share of rivals, to me the conference schedule takes the cake.

Favorite Conference Rivals:

1. Florida
2. Arkansas (this more-so goes back to the Nolan Richardson days)
3. Miss St.
4. Tennessee (Big game for me as I live in Johnson City)
5. Vanderbilt

Non-Conference:

1. Indiana
2. Louisville
3. UNC

Teams I wish we played more often:

1. d"UK"e
2. Memphis
3. Ohio St

Hey JC, from a fellow Tennessean living down near Knoxville in the Powell community!

I think from a purely historical perspective, the greatest rivalry in the history of the SEC in basketball with probably more tradition involved with it would have to be Kentucky v. Tennessee. I have a book from the early 1980s called "The Basketball Vols", which is a narrative history of the University of Tennessee men's basketball program from its rather modest beginnings to about 1982, and it was written by Ben Byrd. In it, it tells about a streak Tennessee had where it beat Kentucky in basketball five consecutive time during the Grunfeld/King era (1970s), and in 1979, when the Vols became the first team to defeat Kentucky three times in a season. The two greatest coaches prior to Jerry Green and Bruce Pearl were former Kentucky head coach John Mauer and Ray Mears had successful runs against the 'Cats, and I do believe that Ray Mears had a winning record against Kentucky, and he most certainly used to school Joe B. Hall, who, in my opinion, was a vastly overrated coach from an X's and O's perspective.

You can't really call North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, or UCLA rivals because they don't play often enough. The most that they rival each other would be on the recruiting trail and that is it. Now, I do consider Kentucky's biggest non-conference rivals to be Indiana and Louisville. Louisville and Kentucky are similar to Carolina and Duke, to Alabama and Auburn, to Texas and Texas A&M, because the two teams are instate rivals. Hell, the governor of Kentucky had to step in to get these two teams to play back in the 1980s because there was so much bad blood between them, they refused to play one another.

If you want my opinion on who are Kentucky's traditional rivals, no doubt, they are Indiana and Tennessee. But if you want a hated rival that is close to home and who has a tradition of excellence that it likes to maintain year after year, then it's Louisville. Louisville has two NCAA Championships and has appeared in nine Final Fours. Who is to say that they haven't aspired to being excellent throughout their history?