Fire Tubby?

The Wildcat fanbase is aflame after certain “fans” decided to boo Sheray when he entered the game. The overall reaction from the media outlets & teh Interwebs has been negative. The post-game call-in show for Lexington’s 630 AM WLAP started with the commentator assessment with the fans: A grade of “A” for most of the game, until the booing, in which the grade dropped to a “D”. John Clay called the boo-ers “classless” in his blog. Jerry Tipton, who’s been accused of being a Tubby poo-poo-er, played it straight in his Notes column. A Sea of Blue calls the incident “Boo-gate” and remarks on the team’s reaction from Matt May’s Cats Pause piece. Kentucky Sports Radio addressed the issue in their post-game comments section, where it took all of two posts to spin the booing into Tubby’s fault.

You can tell which side of the fence I fall on.

This is the latest example of the biggest problem of the Kentucky Wildcat basketball program: the fans. The national media broadcast teams all allude to the problem. During today’s broadcast, Clark Kellogg said that Kentucky would be having a great season to anyone other than our fans. How many times have we heard that over the years? Doesn’t that indicate a problem with our priorities as fans?

Just because we expect excellence doesn’t mean we have to throw ourselves on the ground screaming like two-year-olds when we don’t win.

In the future I’ll write a column about how we UK fans can be prideful about our program without being spoiled-rotten brats about it. Until then, feel free to criticize honestly the play of our UK Players and Coaches on call-in shows. Talk about how we don’t protect the ball, how we play “ugly” basketball, how our juniors and seniors need to pick up their output. Criticize the game.

But when you get into Rupp — where we have recruits and national television — you back your team and your players. You get on board with the players on the court. The players NEED you to scream after every blown call, to drum up some support during an opponent’s run, to rock the rafters after our big plays. Otherwise, as a poster named “Sheray Thomas” put on the KSR thread: “dont boo us it just makes us not care about the fans anymore”

UK Basketball is not a stage play; you are not there to be entertained. You are there to be part of the team. Otherwise, you are being the malcontent player that poisons the team. We already had Team Turmoil last year; we don’t need it again this year.

Update: Saw that Tipton posted about the boos in his H-L Notes column, so I edited my story to reflect that.

Today kids, the word of the day is: capability

I purposefully haven’t read any coverage of the game so I don’t know what the general consensus is. Sometimes it’s good to just form your own opinion without knowingly or unwittingly assuming the herd mentality. So what do I think? I think that was some of the funnest Kentucky basketball I have seen in quite some time. Not the whole game of course, that brings us to our firetubby.com awards for the night.

The Acadamy Award for best Vlade Divac-esque performance goes to:
Kevin Bridgewaters
Best Supporting Actor in a Vlade Divac-esque performance:
The Ref

Those three or four horrendous calls including the Jasper technical killed Kentucky’s momentum in it’s tracks. Up to that point we got to see what looked to me like a truly angry Tubby Smith and a team that suddenly “got it”. They didn’t come away with my 30 like I asked them to but at the end of the night I still ended up a satisfied if not temporarily pacified fan.

Something else we did get a glimpse of is maybe what Ramel was talking about (see pregame). The intensity during the spurt was something that hasn’t been seen on the court by the Cats for a while now. Is that what the practices look like? It felt like they were giving it their all. The in-huddle reports by “I’m Rob Bromley”, as forced and somewhat embarrassing as they may be, show that Tubby is telling them to push the ball. I got a taste of something cool last night. It tasted like capability. I want to see more.

After game thoughts:
It never felt like they could get within striking distance in this game. They were always just playing to stay in it. Randolph Morris was an absolute beast though. 21 points 7 rebounds. This is the type of game it would be nice to see every time out from him, but would it kill him to dive for a ball once in a while?

I was extremely glad to see that we shut down Hansbrough. I haven’t really seen any extended interviews with him, but I swear it looks like there isn’t much going on above the shoulders for that guy. He has that blank look in his eyes, just odd.

Joe Crawford wasn’t the reason we lost but his turnovers stood out the most to me.

We ended up outrebounding Carolina and were dominating them on the boards early in the game. It was nice to see some second chance opportunities at the basket instead of one and done.

You won’t find to much Tubby bashing just for the sake of bashing on this site, but I said from the beginning that we wouldn’t be defending him just for the sake of defending him either. At one point during the game Kentucky fans favorite announcer/commentator Billy Packer said that “Tubby has done a good job of taking the fans out of the game” or something to that effect. My only thought when I heard that was, “yeah, for both teams”.

The rumors of our demise may not have been exaggerated.

I myself on this very page broke out the phrase “statement game”. They made a statement alright. They’re not very good right now. Apparently I missed the release from the University of Kentucky athletics department where Mike Archer has taken over the defensive coaching responsibilities. Oh how I miss the “ball line defense” of years past right about now. Memphis was able to do whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. It also didn’t hurt that they were singeing the nets in the second half.

As bad as this game was, I don’t want to head into Thanksgiving on such a sour note. Randolph Morris had a more than decent game. He wasn’t standing around as much and called for the ball quite often. He was quite effective when he got the touches and looked more like “one of the best big men in the country” that the commentators like to mention.

Update:: A small consolation prize for the night:
North Carolina lost to Gonzaga.

That’s all I’ve got for now. Have a good Thanksgiving everybody.

The first thing that comes to mind after watching this game is a quote from Jay Bilas about Ramel Bradley in last nights DePaul game .

“He’s not necessarily a pass first point guard.”

I would like to add that I’m not sure he’s even a catch first point guard.

At least Duke lost to Wildcat killer Marquette as well.

That’s it. It’s over. They gave it a good fight, but in the end it didn’t happen. We were all hoping that this would be the game they could put it all together. Just this one game. A win in this one game would make us forget about the rest of the season. It would make all the tough losses worth it just to take out a #1. In the end, the same problems that hampered us all year were still there down to the final buzzer. Sloppy ball handling, Randolph in foul trouble, and at the end; rebounding.

Yesterday before the game I was listening to Larry Glover on 590 WVLK and he said he had the feeling that we were going to win the game. The more I thought about it, the more I convinced myself that we were going to win as well. I guess that’s homerisim at its finest. I’m glad that the game was competitive and wasn’t a blowout as some expected (or hoped for). Now let’s see what Tubby can put together for next year. I’m tired of losing.

The Cats took down UAB last night and now have the chance to take on UConn. If you aren’t in the game you don’t have a chance to win, right? Who would have thought that they could win a game with free throws. Shagari Alleyne had a huge impact on the game. This was the type of game that most of the talking heads thought Shagari couldn’t function in. Fast-paced, with a bunch of speedy guards, but he performed effectively under pressure with Randolph in foul trouble AGAIN. Move your feet not your arms, Randolph. Please. On to the round of 32.

2 down -3.293298e-12 to go. Like I said from the very beginning, there are some things that Tubby does that I absolutely do not agree with. One of those things is the benching of people after one mistake. Ramel is one of those players that does not pass go or collect two-hundred dollars when he throws a bad pass, he goes directly to the bench. Tubby has to be trying to teach him a lesson, since Ramel appeared to be such a selfish player earlier in his career. Then there is Patrick. He’s a senior, he’s not going to be changing his playing style at this point.

Case in point: With about 7:30 left in the game today it was tried at 50-50. Patrick gets the ball at the top of the key dribbles over to the side of the court tries to go behind his back and the ball goes out of bounds. It appears, (I say that only because this is what I see sitting at home) that Tubby benches him because of that. Patrick doesn’t return until 2:53 left when we are then down 61-55. I just would have liked to have had him as a shooting option during that portion of the game.

This does not change my opinion of the overall situation. Tubby should not and will not be fired at the end of this season. Even if we lose in the first round of the NCAA’s. It will not happen this year.

2 down 2 to go. With 15 minutes remaining in the first half, I remarked that they were on pace to score 48 points. And then we laughed. Figured it was just another slow start. Then with around 10 minutes to go I said, hmmm, now they’re on pace to score 24 points. It wasn’t so funny anymore. Then Tom Hammond mentioned the 24 points thing and stole my thunder for that angle.

The second half is what watching sports is all about. It’s a thrill you can’t get from the movies. That wasn’t sitting on the edge of your seat fun, that was jumping up and screaming fun. And then slumped in your chair crushed the next minute when the lead climbed back to 10 for the second time and the game seemed over. The second half was Tubby ball at it’s finest.

One down, three to go.