Fire Tubby?

It was a most interesting event, as viewed from the rafters. If you want a complete summary, Matt Jones over at kentuckysportsradio.com liveblogged the event. Let me take a few moments commenting on what I noticed.

• Just Shake Ya Rump — I’ll admit that I don’t follow modern country music. I was equal parts appalled and impressed that there is a nationally-known clogging group called All That!, which shook their asses at most of Rupp Arena. I was also equal parts appalled and impressed that there is a country song that features rapping - it was one of the songs used during the Cheerleader & Dance Squad’s routiene. I guess it connected with the typical Kentucky fan, but I wasn’t the only one snickering in the rafters about it. I bet there were at least 3 other smartasses around me that all made the “I didn’t know N*SYNC was back together” joke when All That! hit the floor. Oh, I didn’t forget the Dance Team’s interpretation to the John Mayer James Blunt song referenced in this post’s title, which honestly, sucked all the energy out of Rupp right before the men’s basketball team came out.
• In The Right Colors — While it was nice to see Kyle Macy again, I don’t think he had the emcee skills to keep up with Christie Thomas. How about we let Kyle do commentary on the scrimmages and just let Christie read from the script?
• Kentucky Woman — As I expected, the crowd was polite but unphased by the appearance of the UK Women’s Basketball team, rebranded as UK Hoops. The players, to their credit, were unphased by the crowd’s nonreaction, and had a blast dancing and playing on the Rupp Floor. I should get the ole webmaster to buy firemickie.com, just in case Coach DeMoss happens to gain some new grumbling fans.
• MEEEESTA CARRRTER — You can’t tell anything about a player or a team during this event. For the most part, it looks like everybody is playing on the blue courts behind Memorial Coliseum. I’m sure most fans were dismayed by Jarrod Carter’s performance in the first half of the scrimmage. He really did look lost about 75% of the time that half. In the second half, he turned things around. He fronted fairly well (like any of them were really trying to play defense; but more on that below). He had one decent post move, and finally positioned himself well to get defensive rebounds.
• JO-DI ME-EEKS! *clap clap clap-clap-clap* — God bless the Internet; now Kentucky fans can figure out which recruits are coming to Madness, and then lead the crowd in chants for those recruits. (According to Matt at KSR.com, they were all very pleased with the support.) However, I felt kinda bad for this year’s recruiting class, who were all playing much harder than the upperclassmen. Jodi Meeks, Derrick Jasper, and Perry Stevenson played extremely well and thrived on the crowd’s roars. Hopefully these three can help us fans forget about recruiting with some stellar early-season play.
• “Please don’t do that during the season” — That’s a phrase that I said at least twice to Randolph Morris when he committed some blatantly obvious fouls. I kid you not, Morris would have fouled out halfway through the second half. Again, I’m not trying to take away expert analysis from what is basically a pick-up game, but it was scary.

As for Tubby, I didn’t catch his TV commentating. (I think they usually have him and a local play-by-play guy talk about the team during the scrimmage.) His announcement to the crowd felt forced; telling us in so many words that this year’s team was not going to be like last year’s team. Also, you could tell in his words that he wasn’t completely sure what to expect out of the team. I think having 5 freshmen, 3 of whom will probably see prominent backup roles, might do that to a coach.

If there were any Tubby haters in the crowd, you couldn’t hear them over the chants of “TUB-BY!”, which were the loudest chants of the evening. That was nice to hear.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 16th, 2006 at 9:09 am and is filed under Cat Commentary, UK Hoops, Recruits. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.