The college basketball season ended without one shining moment; for anybody. For John Calipari and the #8 Kentucky Wildcats, it ended without any postseason at all. In the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, and all the fear it’s causing, extreme caution was used and everything got cancelled, officially, today
The Wildcats end the 2019-20 season 25-6, SEC champions, and the #1 seed in a SEC conference tournament that didn’t happen. We’re all really sad to see college basketball end like this, and on this the season’s final day (almost a week before St. Patrick’s Day) John Calipari sent out a statement of reflection.
“It’s a tough situation,” reads a statement attributed to Calipari that went out a couple hours ago.
You can read the full statement, in Twitter thread form, at this link
“It was hard to tell my guys they won’t have a shot at what they’ve been working for all year – as I’m sure it was for so many other coaches across the country. But there are bigger things at stake here and I understand the decision. It’s no one’s fault.
“As for this team, I’m really going to miss this group. I’m so disappointed they didn’t get to experience a run in the NCAA Tournament because they’ve worked so hard and they deserve it. They were so good to each other.”
Then Coach Cal made a claim that, well, I guess we’ll just never know if this was just big talk, or if his team would have backed up this boast on the court or not. Cal believes this UK side could have cut down the nets at the Final Four in Atlanta. Maybe so- they were slotted as a #2 or #3 seed in most bracket projections.
“I don’t say this lightly: I think I had the national championship team, and this group should go down as one of the most loved teams in my tenure here,” John Calipari continued.
Overall, this bunch had a lot of great signature wins, including over their fiercest of rivals, Louisville and Florida (x2). They also knocked off LSU, Auburn and Michigan State. Could they have won six in a row and added another title to the extensive collection already possessed by this bluegrass state blue blood?
No one will ever know…except for computer and video game simulations, but those aren’t real. It’s too really too bad. This week, every year is about wall to wall basketball. Instead all we got was incessant press releases that said “we value the health, safety and well-being of our student-athletes above all else…” and “we support the NCAA/(insert conference here) decision to suspend the (insert competition here).
While it was the right thing to do, and everyone seems to agree on that, it’s still a major major bummer.
Paul M. Banks runs The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with News Now. Banks, the author of “No, I Can’t Get You Free Tickets: Lessons Learned From a Life in the Sports Media Industry,” regularly appears on WGN CLTV and co-hosts the “Let’s Get Weird, Sports” podcast on SB Nation.
You can follow Banks, a former writer for NBC Chicago.com and Chicago Tribune.com on Twitter here and his cat on Instagram at this link.