Indiana Hoosiers vs. Kentucky Wildcats Series Coming to an End After 40+ Years

[Built Ford Tough]

I was going to post this in the college basketball offseason thread, but I figure it deserved its own thread since it is pretty big news as one of the best non-conference rivalries is coming to an end.

 

The Indiana-Kentucky regular-season series is over for the foreseeable future because neither school could agree on where to play the series.

 

Indiana wanted to continue in a home-and-home setup, while Kentucky wanted to move back to neutral sites and offered to play the series at Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis.

 

"We're not going to play," Kentucky coach John Calipari said Thursday. "We're not going to do a home-and-home. That's out. They don't want to play two games in the state of Indiana, which I'm fine with. There are a lot of people who want to play us."

 

Calipari said Kentucky has the date for Lucas Oil Stadium and still will try to schedule an opponent there next season.

 

"We were willing to play them both in the state of Indiana and they said no to that," Calipari said. "That means they don't want to play us."

 

Indiana coach Tom Crean said in a text message that the Hoosiers never wanted to move the game.

 

"We couldn't have gotten our students up there," Crean said. "Prices would have been too much to get them there. We will have around 8,500 students.

 

"The bottom line is that they didn't want to play home-and-home and we did. We looked at it hard but it belongs on campus."

 

The schools, both among college basketball's blue-blood programs, have met during the regular season every year since 1969, with all but one of those games played in December.

 

The decision to end the series comes after the two teams played a pair of last season's most memorable games.

 

The top-ranked Wildcats lost their only regular-season game last season at Indiana's Assembly Hall. It came on a buzzer-beating 3-pointer from Christian Watford, a shot that set off a wild celebration, with students rushing the court.

 

Kentucky won the rematch, a 102-90 shootout at the NCAA's regional semifinals in Atlanta, and went on to win the national championship.

 

Indiana is being projected as a No. 1 team next season, while Kentucky is expected to be in the top 10.

 

http://espn.go.com/mens-college-basketball/story/_/id/7886942/indiana-hoosiers-kentucky-wildcats-series-ending-venue-disagreement

 

Kind of pissed about this. The IU/UK matchup next year would likely be one of the best non-conference games of the college season and the game they played back in December last season was without a doubt the best college game of the year.

 

What really sucks about this is that both teams are finally back on top of the NCAA. For a while there it wasn't really that intriguing of a matchup because Indiana was going through a rebuilding of their program and before that Kentucky went through a dry spell. Now that both teams are finally back at their best and are poised to deliver some of the best games of the college season the series will come to an end? Garbage.

[Flash]

Lets hope they meet in the title game.