The history of Kentucky Basketball isn't all winning and grinning, especially on the recruiting trail. A bevy of national and conference championships represents enough success to cement a program in legendarium, but from the Adolph Rupp days all the way through John Calipari, a few misses defined the blue and white in the worst possible way.
Before we jump in, I want to give a little credit to Mark Pope for not appearing on this list.
Is that because he's only entering his third year at the helm, and pretty much all of his misses are still in the process of trying to make the Wildcats regret their fallout? Maybe, but I like the guy, so for now he gets an extra golden star for avoiding a mention here.
3. Andrew Wiggins
As a kid, the Andrew Wiggins recruitment was big enough that I remember hearing about it at family pool parties. Everybody was talking about this five-star wing that was meant to change the game in Lexington.
Instead, Wiggins dodged John Calipari and the Cats' 2013 recruiting class in favor of the Kansas Jayhawks. The blue and red didn't win it all that year, but Wiggins could've very well been the final needle Kentucky needed to topple UConn in the 2014 national title game.
His 17.1 points per game should've been more than enough to put those Wildcats over the top for No. 9. What could've been, BBN.
2. Wes Unseld
We're going way back for this one. Unseld, who famously played at Louisville (and was a Louisville native), met with Adolph Rupp at one point before actually taking the floor for the Cardinals. He would've been the Wildcats' first ever African American player, but for precisely that reason, decided against Rupp and Lexington.
Unseld went on to become the only NBA athlete ever to win the Most Valuable Player and Rookie of the Year awards in the same season. One of the best to ever do it had a close shave with Kentucky in 1964.
1. Larry Bird
Okay, this one may be a bit of a reach. But, in my opinion, for there to be any available information on a potential Kentucky-Bird union at all makes this a historic miss that's got to be impossible to beat.
The only catch it, it's a miss for pretty much every other major school that so much as glanced at Bird. One of the best Kentucky coaches to ever do it, Joe B. Hall, dubbed Bird "too slow" to play at the highest level of college basketball. That's a hilarious (slightly painful) twist involving one of the greatest coaches, and players, to ever do it. Hall later admitted that his analysis was a mistake.
Of course, Bird would go on to lead the small-town Indiana State Sycamores to an nearly perfect season before progressing into a professional career that is still mentioned on a daily basis in NBA-related discussions to this day. The rest was, and is, history.
And the same sentiment goes for these misses on the whole. For any other program, names like these turning heel could make or break a team's historical success. For Kentucky, however, we've made up for it other ways.
Eight other ways, to be exact.
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