Kentucky vs. North Carolina score, takeaways: Wildcats wilt in second half, fall to 1-5 in loss to Tar Heels

Things got worse for John Calipari as UNC handed UK its fifth straight loss Saturday in the CBS Sports Classic

Kentucky fans, it is officially time to panic.

If you haven't tossed the towel on this season already.

After an inspired first half on Saturday against No. 22 North Carolina in the CBS Sports Classic, John Calipari's team wilted and wore away with bad shots, spotty defense and then was ultimately done in by foul trouble. UNC won 75-63, improving to 5-2, while UK dropped to 1-5, its worst start since the 1926-27 season. That's 94 years.

Kentucky's offense is woeful; the Wildcats are averaging 62.8 points in their five defeats and rank 300th in the nation in 3-point accuracy with a gloomy 24.3% success rate. 

Let's not waste any more time and get right to the things to know from what happened in Cleveland on Saturday afternoon. 

Kentucky's NCAA Tournament chances are on life support

Anyone claiming otherwise is living in a fantasy world. According to Elias Sports Bureau, the only team in the 64/68-team NCAA Tournament era (since 1985) to make the Big Dance as an at-large after a 1-5 start? It's Texas in the 1998-99 season. No team has ever done it via an automatic bid. So while it's still possible for Kentucky to rally and earn a ticket, it seems unlikely at best. 

Kentucky has shown it's capable of playing with good teams, but it's incapable of beating them. Asking this group to go 40 minutes with more mistakes than not, more made shots than not, is a task too tall at the moment. 

The misery of Kentucky's situation is this: if the SEC winds up being good (and it looks merely acceptable, not exceptional at this point), then what confidence could there be in Kentucky to turn into a top-three team in that league? If it can't do that, it's not going to be in the NCAAs. And if the SEC is down, then quality wins will not be in abundance, which will put a ceiling on Kentucky's resumé even if it's able to somehow rally and turn a 1-5 start into an 18-9 finish. (Teams are capped at 27 regular-season games this season.)

This has been a long time coming for Calipari

We've seen some of this at Duke this season as well, but when you're putting two, three, four or five players into the NBA on an annual basis -- thus forcing you to turn over more than 75%  of your roster in most years -- you are going to wind up with a season with a group that can't cut it. Kentucky has first-round NBA picks on its roster but this is a young team playing in a pandemic-affected season and it's through no fault of their own that it's like this. 

But eventually if you keep your roster loaded up with (talented, five-star-ranked) freshmen, this situation is unavoidable. If anything, it's a credit to Calipari that it's taken more than a decade for it to happen. Even the 2012-13 team that made the NIT would've most likely been in the NCAAs if Nerlens Noel didn't suffer a season-ending knee injury. 

This is Kentucky's longest losing streak since 1989-90, a long ago time when the Wildcats were trying to overcome NCAA sanctions on their way back to relevancy. This situation is not like that. The pieces aren't yet fitting, UK is terrible from deep and it doesn't help its cause when it can't make one second half 3, it has three players foul out and shoots just 60% (18-of-30) from the foul line.

Carolina needed this heading into 2021

Kentucky's the bigger story, but the win is an important step forward for UNC even if Kentucky is bad. The Tar Heels are coming off a brutal, borderline-historic season of their own. I'd wonder if Calipari and Roy Williams don't wind up on a phone call some time soon here, just so Cal can get some perspective and advice with all that Williams went through last season. That Heels group was 14-19 and mired in disappointment. So to get this win Saturday and guarantee a healthy nonconference record (5-2) heading into the 20-game ACC slate is key.

UNC's size remains huge (pun intended). Williams told Bill Raftery on CBS afterward that his bigs were the key in this win. Armando Bacot had a team-high 14 points, but Puff Johnson and Kerwin Walton had significant plays late in the second half to keep Carolina in position to take the game. UNC scored 1.12 points per possession to UK's 0.97. It wasn't 3-point shooting that did it. UNC made only five of its 20 attempts from deep. With 38 points in the paint and 18 second-chance points, that's how UNC overcame this.

The whistle was tight. Sometimes you have to play through that. Sometimes the team with more frontcourt reliance suffers. That wasn't the case here. UNC got a push, and though it still doesn't have a go-to player, the collective has earned its keep and so UNC will remain ranked when the Monday poll refresh comes.