John Calipari knows what coaching at Kentucky means. He’s aware of just how polarizing both he and his program are. Coach Cal is also aware of how much he is scrutinized by the most INSANE and OBSESSED fan base is all of college sports. Calipari doesn’t need to look any further than last season when his Cats had major issues in the middle to late regular season.
Their home loss to irrelevant South Carolina was so bad that Calipari left early, skipped the postgame media opps and had his handler tweet some stuff out later on his behalf.
Calipari took a lot of heat from the media for that and rightfully so. But in the end, Cal led the Cats to the national title game. So he proved all the doubters wrong. Since UK has looked rather unimpressive thus far, and with a very dangerous #5 Kansas Jayhawks looming tonight….Calipari knows the critics are coming. As he pointed out in his press conference yesterday, there are writers out there who have already drafted their harsh critiques of Calipari columns. Those scribes are proverbially holding their finger over the “send” or “publish” button. They’re just waiting for the proper impetus to “go live” with their “hot takes”
Yesterday Calipari took a pre-emptive strike against these guys.
On if he expected there to be a lot of clutter this year …
Calipari: “Oh yeah. It’s us and it’s me. It’s Kentucky. And, you know. I’m going to be one to speak my mind.”
On if there has been more clutter than he expected …
Calipari: “No. But it’s going to be worse.”
People are waiting. You’ve got people right now on radio silence because there’s not enough to write that story. The problem is they’ve written those stories and gotten burned because we turned it around and they look like fools, so there’s radio silence right now because they’re not going to do it yet. And even after this game there will be a couple that just can’t help themselves. ‘I gotta!’ They’ll write something like, what did you do? Why? I mean, it’s just how it is here. Sometimes it wakes me up in the morning and makes me laugh.”
To get the full effect watch the video embedded below. The “I gotta!” is hilarious. It’s toward the end around the 14 min, 14:30ish mark.
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and very often writes The Sports Bank.net ,which is partners with Fox Sports. Read his features stories in the Chicago Tribune RedEye edition. Listen to him on 1620 The Zone. Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks). His work has been featured in hundreds of media outlets including The Washington Post and ESPN 2