And Caitlin plays in a Conference that allows them to play. So what the phuque??
All the National Championships Kentucky won back in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s don’t count? Back when these guys played, a lot of things were different!
Yes, a lot of things were different. Adolph Rupp won several championships with Kentucky in the 1940s and 1950s when the tournament was only 8 or 16 teams and they got in almost every year by virtue of being the best team in an all-white conference.
Of the teams that were part of the SEC at the time Maravich played, only 4 teams aside from Kentucky ever even reached the NCAA Tournament prior to integration and only two of them ever won a game. In 1953, LSU beat Division III Lehigh Valley and then Holy Cross to advance to the Final Four, where they got smoked by Indiana. The Tigers made it back to the tournament the following year but lost their opening game to Penn State. It was their last tournament appearance for 25 years. They never even made it into the tournament with Maravich.
Tennessee’s only NCAA Tournament appearance prior to integration was in 1967. They lost their opening game to Dayton and they lost their consolation game to Indiana.
The only other team to reach the tournament prior to integration was Mississippi State. An unwritten state law prohibited MSU and Ole Miss from playing against Black players. So when the Bulldogs won the SEC regular season title in 1963 and got invited to the NCAA Tournament, they used decoy players to trick the authorities while the real players secretly boarded a charter flight to Michigan, where they lost their opening game to Loyola.
Georgia, Ole Miss, Alabama, Auburn, and Florida never reached the NCAA Tournament prior to integration.
Even Kentucky’s resume wasn’t that impressive in the 1960s. Their last national title under Adolph Rupp was in 1958 when they beat Seattle, who was led by future Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor. Seattle had a double-digit lead until Baylor was forced to sit on the bench for most of the second half with foul trouble.
Kentucky only had one more Final Four appearance under Rupp - the 1966 team that famously lost the title game to Don Haskins and his all-Black starting lineup from Texas Western.
In the three seasons that Maravich played on the varsity team, the entire Southeastern Conference won a grand total of 2 NCAA Tournament games - both by Kentucky. They won one game his sophomore season and one game his senior season.
So, yeah, things were different back then.