Fire Tubby?

This scout.com article caught my eye today so I thought it was worth posting to see what everyone thinks. Two first names guy pretty much says that Kentucky must beat Alabama on Thursday “To even reach the bubble…” So not only is UK not already in the tournament they aren’t even a bubble team at this point.

Did I miss something? I know there has been some major suckage going on this year but is that really the prevailing opinion on the message boards right now? Seriously, I don’t really read them that often, someone fill us in. Do you think as of right now, Kentucky is OUT of the tournament?

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.

Louisville Courier-Journal columnist Eric Crawford says that he only sees one “lock-solid” win left on UK’s remaining SEC schedule. Here’s the direct quote. I picked it up from the excellent Aaron’s UK Basketball Blog.

“And this isn’t the old Southeastern Conference. Look down the remaining schedule and name how many games you think are lock-solid wins for UK. I came up with one.”

Talk about being pessimistic, an eleven game win streak ends and this guy sticks a fork in the teams season.

Ok, so we took a month off. We’re kind of like that house in your neighborhood that still has it’s Christmas decorations up. Hell, we just took down our Festivus pole.

In the mean time, the Cats have reeled off the first 11 of 14 in a row. That’s right, 14 in a row is what we are shooting for. Go back and check out that last link. It’s from a post Chris Diggs wrote for a CJ blog after our last loss. On December 3rd. I linked to it that day.

I was being optimistic by saying “I hope he’s right”, our own Hefty Lefty said “Even in my most blindly optimistic predictions, I don’t have UK winning their next 10-14 games” but the best quote of all comes from a commenter to his original post:

“If you think UK will win its next 14 games, you are on crack. I’ll be back on here to laugh at your prediction.”

Needless to say, he hasn’t been back.

Just ran across Chris Diggs’ post over at the Courier Journal. Down near the end of the post he’s talking about “some of the ignorant” parts of the Wildcat fanbase that are constantly “jumping on and off the bandwagon”.

That part isn’t actually what I wanted to talk about, that’s just the part that will light up his email inbox and the message boards. The part I wanted to discuss is where he believes we will win the next 10 to 14 games. That is a mighty brave statement. Man I hope he’s right. That’s all from me for now. Back to football. Did you see that 60 yard game winning kick against Indy? Wow.

Here is a funny game diary someone wrote. Has plenty of Duke bashing so that’s good. Could have been a little more unbiased though, and included Carolina hating as well.

Rondo is back up a few notches on the latest 2006 NBA draft boards. He is now listed at #14 on nbadraft.net.

There is nothing better than a feud between two local radio guys. John Clay’s blog has the story.