As always, John Calapari represents the University of Kentucky with class and grace with the following quotes about his team’s seeding, location and game times.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t see all of it,\u201d he said of the NCAA Selection Show, \u201cbut you guys \u2026 is ours like the toughest again? Like, by far? Is anyone in here surprised? We\u2019re not playing on Thursday, right? Because we just got done playing today. We\u2019re playing on Thursday? Oh, but we\u2019re close?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cAnchorage or Boise?\u201d he quipped. \u201cIt is what it is. They\u2019re not going to make it easy for us, and they can all say, \u2018This is all by the numbers and all that.\u2019 OK.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cThey\u2019re a good team,\u201d Cal said of Arizona. \u201cI\u2019m surprised they were a 4. How did they drop to a 4? Didn\u2019t they win their tournament? Did Davidson win their tournament? Did Virginia win their tournament? Oh, wow. Did we win our tournament? Wow.\u201d<\/p>\n
“I had to ask my guys, ‘How many of you know what state Boise is in?'”<\/p>\n
Lets remember that Kentucky was ranked 27th in the AP poll going into the SEC tournament and ended up getting ranked 17th by the committee.\u00a0 By the way, if the bracketologists of the Bracket Matrix made the bracket, Kentucky would have been the 3rd 5 seed instead of the 1st one.\u00a0 But of course Cal thought his team should have been ranked higher than that, and that the Committee was out to get him.<\/p>\n
He is complaining about having to play on Thursday – which would mean that they would have to play 5 games in 8 days to get to the Sweet 16.\u00a0 \u00a0Well – the Selection Committee didn’t decide to have the SEC Championship on Sunday.\u00a0 His conference did.\u00a0 Of course, he fails to mention that his team’s opponent Davidson is in the same boat of having to play 5 games in 8 days to get to the Sweet 16.<\/p>\n
Also, he would be playing in Boise even if he was a 4 seed.\u00a0 He can’t be delusional enough that he would have been ranked a 3 seed (or maybe he could).\u00a0 The top 4 protected seeds are sent to their most favorable geographic location available, starting with the 1 seeds.\u00a0 By the time we got to the\u00a0last two 4 seeds available, all that was left was San Diego and Boise – which by the way, both were scheduled to be Thursday \/ Saturday sites.\u00a0 They were sent to Boise since if they win, it would send them to Atlanta (a more favorable Sweet 16 location).<\/p>\n
He is complaining that all of his upcoming opponents won their conference tournament making the draw tough.\u00a0 Well, guess what Coach Cal.\u00a0 32 teams won their conference tournament.\u00a0 You had pretty good odds of eventually having to play one of them.<\/p>\n
And then to continue his sarcasm, he insults the intelligence of his players suggesting that some of them might not know where Boise, Idaho is.\u00a0 I guess it is naive of me to believe that college students know that much geography – or maybe he is implying that his athletes aren’t really college students….<\/p>\n
There are teams that have rights to complain about their seeds.\u00a0 We can get back into USC not getting a bid.\u00a0 How about the fact that the UCLA team that not only beat the 4 seed Kentucky is drawn up against, but also beat the Wildcats on a neutral court ended up in the play-in game that is going on tonight.\u00a0 Oh – but it must be OK for the Bruins to have to win\u00a03 games in\u00a05 days after playing Thursday and Friday in their conference tournament….Not to mention have to travel to Dayton from Los Angeles before heading potentially to Dallas, Texas and then if lucky enough to survive the weekend, Boston.<\/p>\n
You are a Hall of Fame coach – how about acting like one and just talk about how excited you are to play in the NCAA Championship.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As always, John Calapari represents the University of Kentucky with class and grace with the following quotes about his team’s seeding, location and game times. \u201cI didn\u2019t see all of it,\u201d he said of the NCAA Selection Show, \u201cbut you guys \u2026 is ours like the toughest again? Like, by far? Is anyone in here […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2018-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1227"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1228,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1227\/revisions\/1228"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.tehodgson.com\/stompthelunatic\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}