Coach Cal says that his Cats "are not near those guys (UNC) right now"

Now that North Carolina has knocked off the team that used to reside at #2, the Michigan State Spartans, there is nothing left but to wait and anticipate Saturday’s much hyped matchup between Kentucky and North Carolina. Coach Cal has already started downplaying his own team as gameday nears.

“We are not near those guys, right now. I don’t think so. You know what the great news about playing them is that we are going to find out. We are going to find out. You are talking about a well-coached team with terrific players. They have McDonalds All-Americans and a bunch of them not just one or two. They are young at guard and we are young everywhere. You are talking about two teams who are trying to figure out what is what. I have watched and they play and run hard. They run the floor and their big man fly. If you jog up the floor and you are guarding a big man then they are getting dunks. That is just how it is. Everyone talks about our length but they are as long if not longer than us. When they put Henson at the three at 6-foot-10 then all of a sudden they are really long.”

A lot of this can probably be looked at as standard coach-speak. No coach is going to come right out and say they are ready for UNC and are going to whip some Tar Heel tail, but even Cal admits UK was headed in the right direction after the UNC Asheville game.

“I thought that we finally started to get aggressive in the press since we haven’t done it in three weeks and we have practice that. I thought that it looked good. We had eight turnovers which isn’t enough, we should have at least 11 or 12. If you have eight turnovers it means that you are not aggressive enough. They laughed when I told them that in there. They said, `You say we have too many and now you say that we don’t have enough.’ I just don’t think that if you have eight turnovers that you are playing with enough aggressiveness. We created 19 turnovers and only gave them nine offensive rebounds which are things that we have been trying to work on. One thing that I will tell you that is funny is like DeMarcus. We worked on his free throw a little bit and got him instead of a full motion to put it under his chin and shoot it from there. These kids respond when we coach them, but there is so much to do. There is only so many fingers to put in the dike and there is water squirting out from everywhere. So we work on this and that goes haywire then we work on that and this goes haywire. You know what, I didn’t like the effort in the first part of the game but I like the way our guys went out and played after halftime. They really tried.

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