Kentucky basketball is off to a surprising 5-10 start for the 2020-21 season. Wildcats coach John Calipari took the blame for scheduling a difficult out-of-conference schedule, but in SEC play UK is 4-4.

This week, ESPN analyst Jay Bilas visited “The Paul Finebaum Show” and shared his thoughts on UK’s struggles.

“Their players aren’t as good as they’ve been,” Bilas said. “They do have a highly rated recruiting class, but their players haven’t played to the level of their talent or the predictions of their talent. Like, (freshman guard) Brandon Boston has not played well — and, really, very few of their players have played well.

“They brought in a couple of transfers, one of which was (guard) Davion Mintz from Creighton. He’s been good, but they just haven’t been great. They just don’t shoot the ball well. They’re not a tough group together so they don’t get stops when they should, they turn the ball over, they’re just not a very good basketball team.”

Bilas then shifted to his assessment of Calipari.

“You can blame Calipari for not recruiting the type of team that he should have to be better than they are, and that’s fair, but not the idea that the one-and-done is dead and that’s not the way to go,” Bilas said, pointing to Calipari’s history with the program.

“You know, nobody has won more than Duke and Kentucky over the last 10 years. As Calipari got there in 2010, both Duke and Kentucky have consistently won in the NCAA tournament and the regular season as much as anyone. There’s only a couple of programs that can say, ‘Well, we’ve won a couple more games here or there,’ and that’s been Gonzaga and maybe Kansas. Other than that, it’s been Duke and Kentucky, it’s just a question of who they have.”

“It’s not like Calipari’s forgotten how to do this, this is on the players. But what that indicates to me is the players deserved a heck of a lot more credit than they got in years past. So, you know, people can blame Calipari if they want to — he didn’t deserve as much credit as he got in past years, and doesn’t deserve as much blame now. The players deserved way more credit before and they deserve more blame now.”

On Friday, Kentucky paused all team activities for 48 hours due to COVID cases, canceling Saturday’s scheduled game against No. 5 Texas. The Cats are currently scheduled to play No. 12 Mizzou on Tuesday.

[H/T 247Sports]