Kentucky Wildcat 5 things to know for Friday: The "ridiculous" SEC East logjam in basketball
By Paul Jordan
SEC Media Days for basketball has come and gone and the only thing we really know about the SEC East is that anyone can win the division. Or so says John Calipari:
"“I think Florida’s outstanding, I think Billy’s a great coach. But don’t be going to sleep on Georgia. Mark Fox is a terrific coach, but they also have two really good players, maybe two of the best in the division.Kevin (Stallings’ Vanderbilt) teams are always going to be the same, well coached and coming at you. They’re never going to beat themselves, ever. Tennessee, you know what Tennessee’s going to do and how they’re going to play and they’re going to be right there. Mississippi State may be one of the top five teams in the country when they get everybody back.”"
Not to be outdone in dishing out the humble pie, Billy Donovan took the time to say Kentucky may be the team to beat if and when Enes Kanter is able to play while managing to downplay his own team at the same time:
"“Depending on what happens with Kanter, Kentucky certainly probably moves ahead of everybody,” Donovan said. “Bruce has got a deep team. He’s got one of the best players in the league back in Scotty Hopson. All this talk about Florida is great, but it’s not all reality. A lot of it is perception.”"
Are you getting the feeling that John Calipari is sick and tired of talking about Enes Kanter? Yea, me too. Calipari has seemed to have crafted the perfect response to the Kanter question that is deemed to be as non-NCAA bashing as possible:
"“The NCAA is not working against us with this young man, This is a hard decision. He played for the club when he was 14, 15 and 16. They know that. They also know that this decision they make, with a kid in a similar situation, this is going to be (the precedent).”"
We all know that Brandon Knight is going to be very good for Kentucky this season. How good? Well Gary Parrish says that Knight is the ninth best guard in the NCAA. Big praise, yes, but I tend to disagree about Knight being a one and done after this season:
"Knight might not be Derrick Rose, Tyreke Evans or John Wall, but he is the fourth consecutive likely one-and-done point guard for John Calipari, and he’ll be great. Again, Knight won’t be Wall. But could he be the SEC Player of the Year? Yes, absolutely"
We all know that Kentucky has a big showdown versus the Georgia Bulldogs this weekend. The game is especially significant because if Kentucky wins, they will have won three of the past five versus the Bulldogs. Just further proof how far Kentucky has come in the past five years in football. Bu for Bulldog fans, when you think Georgia football, you think Herschel Walker and Herschel is not that happy with what is going on with the Bulldog football program and thinks that Mark Richt needs to “get control” of his team.
Finally, I know this is non-Kentucky news but interesting none the less. The above tattoo resides on the calf of current Wisconsin football coach Brett Bielema. Bielema was a standout player for the Iowa Hawkeyes and go the ink then. Who would have thought that years later, he would end up the head coach of bitter Iowa and Big 10 rival Wisconsin? This has caused quite a stir in the former land of Brett Farve, so much so that Bielama has to constantly talk about the tattoo in press conferences:
We all know that Kentucky has a big showdown versus the Georgia Bulldogs this weekend. The game is especially significant because if Kentucky wins, they will have won three of the past five versus the Bulldogs. Just further proof how far Kentucky has come in the past five years in football. Bu for Bulldog fans, when you think Georgia football, you think Herschel Walker and Herschell is not that happy with what is going on with the Bulldog football program and thinks that Mark Richt needs to “get control” of his team.
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