It’s been a while since I’ve posted, so I have lots of thoughts.
Let’s start with the SEC Tournament, even though it’s old news. The Mississippi State game showcased a tremendous will to win from this bunch. Eric Bledsoe had the greatest intentional free throw miss I’ve ever seen to set up the tying score. And while I first felt bad for Mississippi State because my team essentially knocked them out of the big dance, after watching the end of their NIT loss to North Carolina, my heart stopped bleeding for them. If you let Larry Drew hit a game winning shot over you, Jarvis Varnado, you deserve exactly what you got. And MSU should have beaten Rider, Arkansas, Alabama and Auburn. That’s why you didn’t get into the show, Rick Stansbury. It wasn’t because of a lane violation.
Were you people worried about the draw Kentucky got on Selection Sunday? I know I was. In fact, I cheered ten times harder while watching Texas vs. Wake Forest than I did during Kentucky vs. East Tennessee State. In hindsight, Texas could have hired the Dallas Mavericks to play Wake Forest and Kentucky would have beaten them in New Orleans, so all the worrying was for naught.
Seriously, how good was the big blue in New Orleans? I was halfway worried about East Tennessee State, not that we would lose, but rather that we would play poorly like we did in 2004 against Florida A&M, only win by 12-15 points and create bad karma for the second round game. In other words, I was worried that UK would do exactly what Kansas did. Once again, I couldn’t have been happier for those worries to become moot points.
Against ETSU, Kentucky did what a top seed is supposed to do to a 16 seed. They broke their will to compete. It was over by the second TV timeout. It wasn’t a battle throughout like the Florida A&M game or Kansas’s game against Lehigh. Bledsoe and Patterson set the tone and put feet to throats, never letting go until the final buzzer. They got Mark Krebs and Jon Hood scoring opportunities. It was easy, but it was supposed to be that way.
Going into yesterday’s game, I had talked myself into worry again. I think I’ve been nervous before every game we’ve played the last two months or so. The last one that didn’t make me nervous was LSU. After all, Wake Forest had four big men that Hubert Davis said would have no problem neutralizing Patterson and Cousins. And in Ishmael Smith, they had a point guard who could beat John Wall in a race, and maybe even while dribbling a basketball. And who was going to guard Al-Farouq Aminu? Well, thanks to Dino Gaudio, Aminu wasn’t the factor that he could have been. Leaving your best player in the game after he picks up his second foul in the first half is not smart. I certainly wouldn’t have done it.
There are three Wildcats I am particularly proud of after the Wake Forest game.
The first is Darius Miller. The poor kid couldn’t buy a shot on those awful rims at Bridgestone Arena for the SEC Tournament. Whatever momentum he had personally gained during his strong finish to the regular season was gone, and it didn’t come back against East Tennessee State. When Wake jumped out 10-2 to start the game, it was Miller who cranked up the aggression to 11 and willed his team back into the game when it looked like they were sleepwalking. It was the nicest array of midrange moves I’ve seen at Kentucky since Keith Bogans and maybe even since Ron Mercer. Where has that stuff been all year? But it wasn’t just the offense that made me proud. He rebounded. We’ve never seen that kind of rebounding from Darius before. Again, where did it come from? He drew fouls on Al-Farouq Aminu. He drove at him. This is super aggression, and when Miller plays well, you know what you’re going to get from some players on the team night in and night out, so that makes the team that much more dangerous.
DeMarcus Cousins also made me beam like a proud father. After Wake beat Texas (thanks, Texas!), we all started hearing about Wake center Chas McFarland and how he takes pride in grinding the gears of his opponents. I didn’t realize that he was the dirtiest player in the ACC all four years at Wake, but his demeanor did remind me of a homeless man’s Bill Laimbeer. So we all knew going in that McFarland was going to try and rattle Cousins. And what did Cousins do? He only scored 19 points, grabbed eight rebounds and didn’t even look at McFarland funny. It wasn’t like McFarland didn’t present him with opportunities either. That hard foul in the second half was right down across his face, but Cuz had been hit in the nuts against Tennessee, so I’d imagine once your boys have come under attack, a forearm to the face will feel like a slap on the wrist. Cousins was the bigger man last night, and he made McFarland look like a jackass.
Finally, on a sentimental note, I was happy for Mark Krebs when he hit that three. With everything he’s been through over these last few years, nobody deserved to score in an NCAA game more than him.
The best thing about these games is that the talking heads on TV will continue to doubt Kentucky. They’ve done it all year, so why should they stop? And Calipari just eats that stuff up. Nobody is better at the “nobody believes in us” mentality than John Calipari. Watch ESPN tomorrow. They’ll say Syracuse was the most impressive team. And if it does happen, I wouldn’t want to be Cornell or Wisconsin.
Doesn’t it feel good to punch somebody in the face in the big dance? It’s been too long.
I'm telling you this is a guide and a rule rather than an exception in almost every facet of living. Learn from the mistakes of others. I should have learned more from the coaches back then that would have made the rest of my life better, but I didn't realize how much it applied to everything else in life. 
