John Calipari's Not so Subtle Shot Heard 'Round the World: WBN 4 PM Headlines
The jabbing that goes on between Kentucky coach John Calipari and Louisville coach Rick Pitino is priceless and epic. John Calipari lobbed the latest salvo in Quick Rick’s direction by denying that Louisville’s basketball program even exists in the state of Kentucky.
Cal said in an interview that the thing that makes Kentucky so great is that there are no other big teams in the state to compete against and that fans’ loyalty rest with UK alone. In other states there are two or more schools that have to vie for the affections of the fans.
Examples:
Michigan- Michigan, Michigan State
Alabama- Auburn, Alabama
North Carolina- Duke, North Carolina
Florida- Florida, Miami, Florida State
Texas- Texas, Texas A&M, TCU, Texas Tech
Kentucky- The Wildcats and that’s it, according to John Calipari
John Calipari didn’t just downplay the rivalry with Louisville, he omitted it from existence. He told the Cardinal program and their fans that their 2 titles in the 80’s mean nothing to him and they are as good as a bye week in the schedule, without even saying their name.
Some sports writers and Louisville fans are downplaying this as a major gaffe on Cal’s part; they need to realize that he doesn’t make mistakes. He isn’t Michele Bachmann. Everything he says is calculated from the first word to the last word. He knew exactly what he was saying and he wanted it to hurt.
Look at the context of his statmen: he was standing in the middle of Tent City where hundreds of crazed Wildcat fans were camping out for tickets to a intersquad scrimmage game. He knows the passion of the fans in this state for his team is unequaled around the country, much less equaled in the city of Louisville.
Louisville might as well not exist in the Commonwealth of Kentucky much less the rest of the United States of America. Louisville doesn’t matter to anyone else except Louisville fans and Cal knows it. Louisville doesn’t even matter to Rick Pitino since he is constantly lamenting the fact that he left “Camelot” (aka Kentucky) for the craptacular institution he is now in charge of.
Thank you Coach Cal. Never leave us.
Headlines:
-I am going to try and not talk to much about basketball since we are still in the middle of football season despite what many of you think about our team. We do have a game on Saturday at South Carolina and Joker Phillips is 1-0 against the Ole Ball Coach since taking over at Kentucky.
-The line in Vegas for this game is -21 against the Cats. The game is at 12:20 for the second week in a row and hopefully the crowd will be a little sleepy. It was at the LSU game and the Cats were only down two touchdowns at the half and South Carolina is NO LSU.
-Steve Spurrier hates Stephen Garcia and always has. He finally benched his much maligned senior in favor of sophomore Connor Shaw. I will get into Shaw’s numbers tonight in my WBN Game’s of the week post. Let’s just say they aren’t impressive.
-When asked by the press about his confidence level after being benched in favor of Maxwell Smith against LSU, Morgan Newton said that he is still “Sky High” and that he has to have a great deal of confidence in himself to be an SEC quarterback. I wish I shared your positivism, Morgan.
-Missouri looks to be for sure coming to the SEC in order to have the league at an even 14 teams. The Big 12 is now down to 8 teams in the conference and would like to have 10 in order to have a a conference title game at the end of the year. The top candidates seem to be as follows: TCU, West Virginia and Louisville. Do yourself a favor Big 12, don’t bring your conference down any further by adding the Dirty Cards.
-If Louisville does go to the Big 12, where does that leave Rick Pitino? The coach has very publicly stated that he does not want to switch conferences and he wants to make the Big East work with the remaining teams. The problem is that football makes money and Big East football will be worse than it already is and many speculate that the BCS might withdraw it’s automatic bid. If Duh Ville goes to the Big 12, would that spell the end for Pitino at Louisville?
-ESPN has a gallery from it’s “Body” issue up on it’s site. It has pictures of Hope Solo, USA women’s soccer star and hottie, as a featured model so you need to check that out. I would link the site but I’m not 100% sure of the WBN’s code of ethics and I don’t want Paul to fire me. I like all of you too much.
–John Clay has a nice little write up about how the pros are liking Lexington. It’s pretty bad ass that the NBA has made it’s defacto home base Lexington, Kentucky during the lockout. Again, never leave us coach Cal.
-I was going to link the Lexington-Herald Leader’s player profiles for the new basketball Cats but I didn’t because we are doing our own and ours will be much better. No need to be humble, we are that awesome.
That’s all for now kiddos. See ya on the flip side.
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