Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: Governor's Cup Edition

Welcome to Tuesday morning, ladies and gentlemen of the Big Blue Nation, and to the Governor’s Cup edition of the Quickies.

Mark Stoops calls for a packed stadium Saturday against Louisville, and I suspect he’ll get it, for the most part, unless the weather is just horrible.

But Stoops needs a season-changing win. The win last week over 2-9 Charlotte didn’t inspire many Kentucky fans.

Win or lose, Stoops is very unlikely to face firing this season. But as Fox Sports writes, he won’t have any excuses next year.

Tweet of the Morning

Call me crazy, but I'm starting to think there are at least five players in 2016 that are superior prospects to anyone in 2015.

— Evan Daniels (@EvanDaniels) November 24, 2015

Wow.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

• Mark Stoops badly needs a victory on Saturday, and that’s a fact. But Mark Story thinks Bobby Petrino needs one as well.

• Q&A with Mark Stoops prior to the Louisville game.

• Mike Edwards is your SEC Freshman of the Week. Congrats!

• Five things Kentucky must do to beat Louisville. Sounds good to me.

Kentucky basketball

• To nobody’s surprise, the basketball Wildcats are ranked #1 again. Well, it’s not like we haven’t been there before, and very, very recently.

  Honestly, based on what I’ve seen so far, this ranking is fine by me. I don’t know if Kentucky is the best team in the nation, but they are well within shouting distance based on what I’ve seen so far.

• Sacramento Kings reportedly to make an offer that John Calipari "cannot refuse." I hope it doesn’t involve a horse’s head…

• Tyler Ulis is co-SEC Player of the Week. One of many such awards this season, I expect.

Links posts

• The Leach Report: Tuesday Wildct Links

College football

• Dak Prescott writes about why he came to Mississippi St., and what it’s meant for him to play there. This is a quality young man, and he deserves all the accolades he’s received, as far as I can tell. He’s certainly had a fantastic career in Starkville.

• ESPN reports "good possibility" that LSU buys out Les Miles’ contract. Les Miles reminds me an awful lot of Tubby Smith. Despite all his success and a national title, he has always had less than the full-throated respect of his fan base.

  No matter what happens, Miles will land another quality job — Maryland fans are already licking their chops. As to who LSU can hire to replace him, all I can say is that Nick Saban is not walking through that door.

  More:

  Here's my problem with LSU's fanatical push to get rid of Miles: NOBODY is beating Nick Saban (much) these days. So…who do you hire?

  — Justin Rowland (@RowlandRIVALS) November 24, 2015

• College football coaching rumors from Team Speed Kills.

• CFB Playoff: Who replaces Ohio State?

College basketball

• South Carolina beats Tulsa by one to win the Paradise Jam. Impressive hoops from the Gamechicks. Has Frank Martin finally got them on the right path?

• Down go the Hoosiers, this time to Wake Forest. It’s probably time for Tom Crean to take on the mantle of "Dead Man Walking."

• Vanderbilt routs St. Johns in Maui. Vandy is a dangerous, dangerous team this year.

• Kansas and the NCAA talking past each other on the Cheick Diallo matter. Good grief, NCAA, let him play.

Other sports news

• Nice whistle, ref. It’s clearly there for decoration only, though.

  Melo was taking ALLL of the steps before shooting last night: https://t.co/StirIhAhOI pic.twitter.com/FKiLHbkfyz

  — SB Nation (@SBNation) November 24, 2015

  Witness your NBA, where "traveling" applies only to the interstices between games.

• Rajon Rondo has 20 assists … in one game! Four of them in a row were to Boogie Cousins, and probably twelve of them were to either Cousins or Rudy Gay.

• The Washington Redskins’s Jason Hatcher (not ours) suggests that officials are making calls against their team because the Redskins nickname is under fire. Bold statement, Hatcher. Now get out your wallet.

• Former UK wide receiver Chris Matthews signed to Ravens’ practice squad. That’s quite a drop from the halcyon moments of last season’s Super Bowl, where he was an impact player, but such is life in the NFL.

• Former baseball great Rod Carew talks about his near-miss with death from a heart attack. Medical science is amazing — only ten years ago, Carew would not have survived the massive heart attack that leaves him alive, but needing a heart transplant in an ideal world. At 70, he’s on the border of being too old and the left ventricular assist device keeping him alive may wind up being his permanent companion. But alive he is.

  What a great career this man had. I remember him from back when I was growing up and was a baseball fan.

• Is John Wall about to change shoe company brands? He’s a "free agent" now.

Other news

• Turkey apparently shoots down a Russian warplane either over Syria or Turkey, depending on who you believe. Uh oh.

• Will our descendants survive the destruction of the universe? Um … no?

• Heh. Sometimes reading theories about Faster Than Light (FTL) travel just seem to come straight out of sci-fi, and I mean specifically. This author writes about the potential use of gravity in FTL travel that immediately calls to mind the Alan Dean Foster’s Flinx of the Commonwealth series KK (Kinoshita-Kurita) posigravity drive, where the ship creates a small black hole a discreet distance from itself, allowing the vehicle to "fall" endlessly toward it while moving it at the same time, creating a carrot-donkey effect.