Kentucky Wildcats to Partake In "Champions Classic"
By Paul Jordan
It’s a slow news day out there in UK land with Enes Kanter news supposedly coming Friday. In the mean time it’s never too early to look ahead in UK basketball so we are going to go forth and look ahead all the way to next season.
There will be another tournament the Kentucky Wildcats will be playing in next season. No we aren’t going back to the Maui, or the Great Alaskan Shootout.
The new tournament was announced a few weeks ago, and it may have gotten lost with all the new Kanter information but it is a pretty big deal seeing that this new tournament features four of the prominent college basketball programs. One of those teams is the Kentucky Wildcats.
Kentucky, Duke, Michigan State and Kansas have each signed a three year deal to play one another in three different venues each year. The tournament is called the Champions Classic, why? These four teams will bring in 16 national championships under one roof. More importantly it gives college basketball an ‘opening day’ type of feel because that is one thing college basketball lacks, a true opening day for the fans to draw viewers away from football.
John Calipari is reported to be the master mind of all of this, even though he isn’t taking credit for it in the press but he has been floating around the idea around the program to play great programs like Duke, Kansas and Michigan State every year at neutral locations, finally Kentucky has inked the deal to play these schools.
“This three-year event is a reward for how passionate these fan bases are for their teams,” UK Coach John Calipari said in a statement.
“It’s a unique opportunity for our fans across the nation to see us play in three major cities against top-level competition. We are looking forward to the challenge and sharing it with the Big Blue Nation, the best fans in the country.”
The site locations of the games each year is very intriguing as well to see how well UK fans can travel compared to the rest of the fan bases of the other three schools. Kentucky will play Kansas at the beginning of the season next year on November the 15th in Madison Square Garden. Duke in the Georgia Dome November 13th of 2012 and Michigan State in the United Center on November 12th of 2013.
These games each year will have a final four feel to them, but you have to think of how good this is for recruiting and for the UK men’s team seeing how Calipari has openly said he dislikes the thought of these pre-season tournaments such as the Maui, and even tried to get the Wildcat’s out of their tournament last year. This one should be better for him. Kentucky is guaranteed one game, a win or loss. Other tournaments you could very well be handed three losses.
Finally, Kentucky gets all the exposure it needs anyway with every game being televised by some TV station, but this is overall good for college basketball and we can all be glad that Kentucky is the face of that. The college basketball world will now be greeted with an opening day. Don’t get me wrong, I love the 24 hours of college basketball, I’ve watched at least 16-17 hours of it each year but college basketball NEEDS this because just the average college fan isn’t going to tune into watch Gonzaga against St.Marys every single year.
They will tune in to see what very well could be a final four any given year in November.
Read more here about the Champions Classic:
http://www.kentucky.com/2010/12/09/1557809/report-uk-duke-kansas-mich-st.html#ixzz18Cq9W6R1
http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=5898231
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