Running 2022-23 NCAA Basketball Thread

They downsized Rupp Arena? That's quite a statement about the interest in college basketball attendance nationally. If any place should be immune from such things, you'd figure Rupp would be it.

 

Went from 23,500 to about 20,500 when they went from bleachers to chairbacks in part of the upper level. That was a mercy mission, as those bleachers sucked to sit in.

 

Loudest basketball arena I've ever been in.
Are they sure they want to run off Calipari and lose a class with four top players? Or are they tired of hearing about what a great class is on the way and then seeing it fail to live up to expectations and presumptions?

 

Yes to both honestly. Mostly they want Cal to acknowledge the game has evolved past the dribble drive and quit playing a pair of bigs together who never stretch the defense out to the perimeter.

 

I will agree that losing to this South Carolina team at home is not a good sign.

 

I’ll raise you Cory Alexander, who is doing PBP for Florida State-Wake Forest in Winston-Salem on ACCN with Randolph Childress doing analysis. They were teammates at Flint Hill Academy during their school days.

 

Dykes and Jay Bilas worked better together than I’d have thought, which is not the same as saying they worked great. Actually I found Dykes less annoying than usual because he was too busy to get into his usual schtick and catch phrases. When you consider he was out of his comfort zone and was supposed to be off after being in Lexington the previous night, it deserves an A for effort at least.

 

I'm a moderator for a URI basketball board, and the buzz over the off-season was that Jacob Toppin (former URI player that transferred to Kentucky) was going to have a huge year. You see, they had this new camera technology that tracker how long everyone was in the gym, and he led the team in that stat, plus it was helping him improve his shooting form.

His shooting is down about .130 across the board, and he's shooting 20 percent from 3-point range. He's averaging two more rebounds per 40 minutes, but his assists, steals and blocks are the same or down. It's example like five million about how work ethic and off-season coachspeak doesn't correlate to production necessarily.

 

If you're ingraining bad habits through practice in an empty gym, it's probably worse than doing nothing at all.

 

Big win against St. Bona's last night. The A-10 looks wide-open, and I really thought Loyola would be better.

 

Damn.

Mitch Barnhart clears the air on John Calipari, Kentucky basketball

"An explosive new report from The Athletic's Kyle Tucker this week painted UK Athletics as a model of dysfunction behind the scenes, claiming, among other things, that head coach John Calipari had raised $30 million in private funds for a new basketball practice facility only to have it blocked by Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart.

With the Wildcats basketball program struggling and fans already unhappy about the university's refusal to sell alcohol at Kroger Field and a sense that UK is still dragging its feet in NIL, the report set off a firestorm among the Big Blue Nation online."