So we lost to Gardner-Webb. In the post-game press conference, Coach Gillispie said “[The Wildcats] look like they got whipped to me.” I think they got taken to school, and thank Basketball Heavens for that.
Jerry Tipton mentions in his blog that after Tuesday’s game with Central Arkansas, Billy said that Gardner-Webb was the kind of team “that could expose the Cats.” Gardner-Webb played the kind of team-committed basketball that Gillispie preaches. Instead, our Kentucky players looked like a bunch of guys who had been playing out at the Blue Courts in front of Wildcat Lodge; tired from holding court for a couple of hours and ready to get knocked off by an inferior team. There was little passion on the defensive end. What passion showed up on the offensive end was not smartly used.
It seems like this Wildcat team has a lot to learn. “You can’t just show up on the court and think you’re going to beat somebody because you wearing a certain jersey,” Gillispie mentioned in the post-loss press conference. This seemed to echo what Ramel Bradley said post-game:
“We learned a lot of lessons tonight. We watched them move the ball well, help on defense, run the floor and go hard. These are all lessons we needed to learn. This is a wake up call for us. Just because our jersey says Kentucky across the front doesn’t make it an automatic win for us. We have to play with more pride. This is a blessing in disguise.”
Something tells me that Ramel is repeating what his coach told him in the locker room immediately after the loss. Repetition is a decent way to learn things, like multiplication tables. However, sometimes the only way you learn is by trying and failing. Or maybe in this case, half-assing and failing.
Sometimes you learn by embarrassment. The Big Blue Nation was so ready to start roaring about our pre-season ranking that we didn’t see the signs in this early season — a team still feeling itself and its new coaching staff out. Nothing like a nice public whipping by a small North Carolina school to bring you back to earth.
By RPI rankings, this may be the worst home loss of modern times. But I do not believe we fans should be acting like its the end of the grand tradition of University of Kentucky basketball. The long-term consequences of this loss only occurs in March if Kentucky is on the bubble. And I’d rather worry about March in March, not just two weeks into the season. (Besides, what if Gardner-Webb wins 20 games and their conference? This loss will still be bad, but not nearly as terrible as it is now.)
As for the Wildcat players, they should be thanking the NCAA rules that Billy can’t run them any harder than he’s going to run him the next couple of weeks. They may learn to appreciate their class and tutor time, since they’ll be able to sit down. My guess is they’ll be learning more than that.
