So are you ready for some Alan Cutler snarkyness? If you’re not, well to bad. Some sites would call this type of behavior douchebaggery, but you won’t find that kind of negativity on this site. No sir. We will stick with snarkyness. Have a look. Go ahead, it won’t hurt, it’s a really short clip.
Where do you get your Wildcat news? I have a list of sites that I visit regularly to keep up with whats going in the world of Wildcat sports. Here’s a compendium of sites from around the internets. Why would we want to show you links to all these other UK sites? Think of us like that insurance company that gives you three other competitors quotes and lets you choose the best one. We know you will be back.
I originally had a huge list, but I decided to split them up into different categories. These are really in no particular order. Up first:
Blogs
Aaron’s UK Basketball Blog - You won’t find any articles or commentary on this site. The guy (Aaron) just compiles most (if not all) the mainstream stories concerning just the basketball team. He’s pretty good about getting up the latest and greatest info, except anything from your favorite site, firetubby.com. Come on Aaron how bout some link love!
Sports Talk on Kentucky Sports Radio - This site is probably the most popular in the blog category simply judging by the amount of comments their posts get. Also, this site crosses the threshold from fan blog to insider. The man in charge over there, Matt Jones has a radio show in Louisville. He also has “inside sources” and often interviews the football and basketball recruits. This is one site I’m pretty the entire staff of firetubby.com checks every day.
The AOL FanHouse Kentucky Basketball Blog - This is a subsidiary of the AOL NCAA FanHouse blogs and is generally manned by (accused Flordia homer 
and all around good sport) Ryan Ferguson. Our own Gimel Martinez has had a couple of monumental blog comment battles with him and both lived to talk about it. We all enjoy reading your stuff (agree or not), keep up the great work.
A Sea of Blue - A Sea of Blue is a regularly updated site where you can find interesting commentary. They compile their own “SBN Top 25″ and SEC Player of the Year rankings every week. Good site.
Big Bad Blue Blog - This site is a relative newcomer onto the UK blog scene (since November).
Brett Dawson’s C-J Blog - This site probably falls into the gettin’ paid category but since it’s in blog format I’ll put it here. He is a beat writer for the C-J and has an interesting perspective on things. His “Mother Knows Best?” post about Randolph is pretty funny.
John Clay’s Sidelines Blog - John Clay is a sports columnist for the HL. An excellent feature of his site is that he live blogs every UK football and basketball game. If you haven’t had the chance, you should really check it out. Mr. Clay is also (as far as I know), the first person to send a link our way and he even wrote about firetubby.com in the newspaper. Thanks John!
Damn, I didn’t realize there were this many when I started.
Outside the Huddle - A blog from some of the guys from Lexington radio station Sports Radio 1300 WLXG.
The Wildcat Blog - The Wildcat Blog is a fan blog.
Fire Rich? - firerich.com is the companion site that you see linked over on the side denoted by the picture with Rich Brooks’ head on it. It started with a similar goal as this site. To keep it out of the hands of the football gloom-and-doomers. It is mainly the territory of our managing football editor/firerich.com lead columnist Hefty Lefty. Don’t pass up the opportunity to check out Gimel’s outstanding heckler article. That was also the first link that we ever had Deadspun? Deadspinned? If you don’t understand what that is, don’t worry about it. It’s only a big deal to aspiring bloggers.
And finally…
Fire Tubby? - A mish-mash of a site where you can find anything from a sportscaster eating Wheaties live on air, to a conspiracy about Tubby’s Jacket. We try to update regularly (not counting those month long hiatuses). We don’t get a lot of links from other UK related sites out there I think mainly because people believe it’s another Tubby basher site. (Don’t worry I’ll recap some of those as well. Equal opportunity you know.) If you enjoy what we do around here spread the word and let people in on the joke. Thanks for stopping by. Go Cats!
This is by no means intended to be a complete list. I’m sure there are more out there that you might read. Hell, maybe you have your own site you would like to let us know about. If so, drop us an email or comment because we would like to check it out. This turned out to be a really long post with just the blogs so I’m going to break it up into a couple of posts. Up next: The message boards.
Time to catch up with the weekly standings. The AP poll doesn’t come out until later in the day so I’ll update it when it comes out. update:The AP came out and there was no change from last week. They are effectivley 27th with 106 votes. UK jumped one spot to 24th in the ESPN poll. They were bumped up in both the Sagarin from 9th to 7th and the Pomeroy polls from 14th to 13th. The RPI drops them two spots from 7th to 9th.
There is a three-way tie in the SEC East at second place. Georgia, Vandy, and Kentucky are all 5-2 with steamroller Florida all alone in first at 6-0. Kentucky jumped a spot in scoring in the SEC and dropped a spot in defense.
This is something I noticed a week or so ago when I read about how the GPA of the basketball team was 3.2 for the fall semester. Since then I have had several people bring up this point in a “no wonder we lost to Vandy” type fashion. At the time I didn’t even really give it a second thought and gave the comment a cursory “ha ha, yeah I guess so”. Today during the game Gus Johnson mentioned the GPA and Clark Kellogg said something along the lines of how Tubby must be proud or he’s doing a great job.
My question to you is, do you think most fans equate a smarter (as in book smart) team with less success on the basketball court? I think they do. If you can truly say that you responded to Gus Johnson’s comment today with a “well that’s really good,” then good for you. I suspect most people that have either read or heard the GPA information today probably said “well there’s your problem”.
Admittedly, I struggled mightily in every Economics class that I have ever taken but I have put together a simple graph to display my point.
College teams that struggle in the classroom are often paraded around by the NCAA as being unacceptable. Pair this along with graduation rates and I believe programs are now susceptible to penalties. Kentucky in previous years has appeared on these lists for their low graduation rates and I think Bob Huggins while at Cincy was the standard bearer.
Maybe after a 19 point win isn’t the best time to bring up such a topic, but what are the fans that would like to see Tubby gone willing to trade to get back to the final four. Would you trade three year’s probation for a championship? Would you like to have back C.M. Newton or Larry Ivy under which several NCAA violations occurred?
As always, your opinions and comments are welcomed. Agree or disagree. Let us know.
Whew. Just to show you what a two game losing streak can do to a usually optimistic UK fan (myself), I was nervous with around two minutes to go and a hefty lead that Tubby was taking the “starters” out to soon. Even though the win will be discounted by the “Lofton didn’t play” crowd it was nice to end the game with a sizeable margin in front of a semi-national TV audience. Since Kentucky has performed so poorly in the other nationwide games this one could help with seeding down the road.
As someone that doesn’t go to a lot of the games, I have a couple of questions to those of you that either have better hearing or got to see it in person. Plus, I’m sure some other people are curious as well. What does the triangle, or pyramid that Ramel shows after he makes a shot mean? I know that Woo has his W. Also what was the eRUPPtion Zone chanting at the end of the game. Sounded something like “we want Dwight”.
update: A quick thegoogle search reveals what Ramel’s triangle means via a Jerry Tipton article.
Damn, no midweek game this week. Sucks.
Kentucky has been placed on the box of “The Breakfast of Champions®” cereal. Wheaties paid Collegiate Licensing Company $85,000 for the use of the logo and UK will get an 85% cut of that. Read all about it in the HL. Justin White from LEX18 did a live on-air taste test. Check it out.
That’s the name of a category over on the Georgia Sports Blog anyway. It’s funny how things work out like that. On one hand you have a very vocal group of UK fans that wish Tubby would have never started here and they can’t wait until he leaves. On the flip side of that you have (I’m assuming here) quite a few Georgia fans that wish Tubby had never left and that he would come back. Although I’m sure that feeling is probably starting to dwindle now that they are having some success and are away from the disastrous Harrick era.
That’s all I have for now. Move along. Come back later.
Some guy over on ESPN.com really tears into Tubby and the Cats in this article. Yesterday people were declaring “Kentucky could win the national championship“, and today you have this guy saying things like:
“Even after winning the school’s seventh national championship, Smith largely shied away from signing high-caliber players the Wildcats could have had. He focused more on lesser talented players that he could mold into a team and low-maintenance players that would fit his methodical, inside-outside offense.”
He mentions Tayshahn and Bogans as two exceptions to the type of crummy players Tubby likes to recruit. Then he picks on the (admittedly) weakest class Tubby has recruited by mentioning:
“Nondescript players like Lukasz Obrzut, Sheray Thomas and Bobby Perry became the norm.”
That is hardly the truth. I know, I know, this point has been beaten to death but he did have the number one class soon thereafter. You can’t have it both ways. If you rank recruiting classes before their first game you have to stick by this and can’t dismiss it at a later date because they didn’t pan out. I plan to write a column on this one day. No matter if every player from that class leaves the team it was still a number one class.
He then has this little comment:
“The Wildcats (15-5, 4-2 SEC) haven’t beaten any team of consequence since defeating Indiana 59-54 at Rupp Arena on Dec. 9 (unless you count Louisville), or really any formidable opponent before then (unless you count DePaul) for that matter.”
Ok, this guy is starting to piss me off. Who the hell is he to be discounting our wins versus Louisville. It’s fine if one of the Tubby Basher’s want to talk crap about who UK has played, because they usually are still pulling for the team to win (usually). But I’ve never even heard of this guy.
Google search: Mark Schlabach
Ahhh, I see what’s going on here. The first link from google shows what the problem is here:
“Mark Schlabach joined ESPN.com in July 2006 as a college football and basketball columnist. A graduate of the University of Georgia…”
A lot of the people from the other SEC schools are taking their shots while UK is in a down period right now since they have all been doormats to the SEC Championship for years. Problem solved.
I’m probably more interested in this stuff than most people, but I find the Lexington media fascinating. More specifically, the sports coverage. That’s why you are likely to come to this site and see me discussing the latest media personality running from the cops or when one of them is arrested for drunk driving and allegedly kicking a cop in the junk.
Last weekend I posted the video of Alan Cutler’s reaction to the Vanderbilt loss. In the video he was well, being Alan Cutler. Over-enunciating every third word and in general just sounding a little condescending. Cutler isn’t known for being the biggest supporter of Tubby Smith fan (more on this in a second) so it probably wasn’t much of a surprise that he was fired from his radio show on WLAP. He is being replaced by another well known sports personality in Lexington, Dick Gabriel. His show will be called Sports Nightly with Dick Gabriel. You can read all about it on the HL’s site. Host Communications and Clear Channel are trying to push this show statewide via UK’s Big Blue Sports Network. Cutler had this to say about the situation.
“Host Communications can’t have someone like me saying whatever I feel about the University of Kentucky.”
So that may be the reason he was being especially Alan Cutlerish in his report. It’s also worth noting that Cutler is apparently a member of the anti-Tubby site Dynasty Defenders. The guy that runs the site katman2000 also posts videos on YouTube and one of his videos is about whether Cutler was fired because the UKAA sent the word from on high. Who knows. And just because, here is a picture of WLEX sportscaster Ryan Lemond.
For those of you that read Bill Simmons, The Sports Guy on Page 2 over at ESPN this may be familiar. What you just witnessed comes in at number four on his 13 levels of losing chart. That’s right, the fourth most painful way for your team to lose a game. It is appropriately named The Broken Axle, because the wheels just came flying off in that game.
While watching the first half I had the feeling (as I’m sure most people did) that the players only meeting that Ramel and Bobby called earlier this week, and the long practices actually did some good. That the extra measures taken this week had been effective at stopping the losing streak at one. It felt as if it had finally “clicked” for everyone and that Tubby had an excellent game plan for the Dawgs. Mark Coury looked like he belonged on the court, Joe Crawford was scorching hot with 17 points, and all the substitutions were playing defense. On a side note, Perry Stevenson has a new nickname on this site: Ricochet.
In the second half UK made Takais Brown look All-World and for the second game in a row Randolph Morris did his best “Tyler Hansbrough vs Kentucky” impersonation. Did the team come out flat after halftime? Yes. Was Tubby out coached after halftime. Most definitely. Just to recap for a second, UK goes into the locker room with a 43-30 lead. What do you tell the team at this point if you are the coach? Keep up the energy, keep up the defensive pressure and stick with the game plan?
Tubby has always been (and I don’t think there is to much contention on this point) excellent at making adjustments during halftime. In my opinion one of Tubby’s weaknesses is that he isn’t very good at making strategy changes during the game. Dennis Felton “pulled a Tubby” and changed his defensive scheme and the Kentucky could just never adjust. That was truly one of the worst losses in recent memory.