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Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: St. Patrick's Day Edition

News and commentary from around the Big Blue Internet. Happy St. Patrick's Day! Bat Cats host Ohio today. Hoops #2 seed. More.

By Glenn Logan
Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Happy St. Patricks day to all of you, I hope it's a glorious one. Don't forget to wear green

Tweet of the Morning

Haha!

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

  • Cincinnati Bengals may like Za'Darius Smith as their next defensive line project.

    One of the most popular targets for the Bengals in this year's draft, at least in the public eye, has been Kentucky pass-rusher Bud Dupree.

    Don't sleep on his Wildcat teammate though, as Za'Darius Smith also has the team's attention. The Bengals sent head coach Marvin Lewis, defensive-line coach Jay Hayes and several scouts to Kentucky's Pro Day on Thursday. Cincinnati and Baltimore are among the teams that have talked to Smith leading up to his Pro Day.

    Both could be just right up the road. Very cool.

Kentucky basketball

  • You can rip the NCAA committee all you want, but #1 is undisputed. This article talks about the predictable NCAA Tournament snubs.

  • Ron Cook of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a very nice piece on John Calipari today, and about his player's first philosophy. Here's a taste:

    Calipari didn’t stand in front of his Kentucky bunch in October and make the national championship the team goal. Instead, he said, "I’m on a mission to get seven of you drafted in the first round … I’m on a mission to get eight of you drafted, maybe nine.’ "

  • Now, Ashley Judd knows why I say that Twitter is the devil. Quite aside from this particular event, the mob culture of the microblogging platform is democracy at it's worst, and the shaming culture of Twitter must be stopped. The best way is just to eschew it completely, and if not for the blog, you can be assured you would never see anything from me.

    To top this, she received threats of sexual violence from abusive Twitter users for bemoaning Arkansas' physicality during the game. She doesn't plan to take it lying down, either:

    In an interview with "MSNBC Live with Thomas Roberts" this morning, Judd said she plans to press charges against those behind the more disturbing threats of sexual violence she's received on social media. She discussed the responses to her basketball-related tweets in particular. "Well apparently I’m a ‘whore.’ I’ve been called the c-word," she told Roberts -- epithets she apparently earned for suggesting the Arkansas team was playing dirty.

    The temptation will be to tar all Arkansas fans with a broad brush, but resist that, please. We know all to well that every fan base, including Kentucky's, has people like this among them. The answer is not shaming them, either, although they deserve it. Don't become what you hate.

  • Coach Cal is the AP Coach of the Year, WCS and KAT All-SEC first team, Aaron Harrison Second team. Andrew is the odd man out, it seems.

  • You can't have a good article about Calipari without a bad one. Bob Raissman of the New York Daily news opines:

    Calipari is a cat you either are hopelessly devoted to or despise. He’s absolutely made for TV. Those who make TV know it. This is why he is being forced fed to the unwashed masses and will continue being jammed down our throats throughout the tournament.

    We are already sick of Calipari. This from someone who actually likes him. The tipping point came on ESPN’s "Outside The Lines." The presentation was thoughtful enough, a one-on-one with Calipari followed by a panel discussion. There were no grand revelations, nor did we expect any.

    Embrace the hate.

  • Calipari likes Steve Masiello because "He's crazy like I am." Love it.

  • Okay, tinfoil hatters — here's the piece you have been waiting for. Path is clear for Duke run to Final Four:

    1. Duke has a clear path to the Elite Eight: Mike Krzyzewski has already won four national titles and there's a good chance that at the least, he'll have a prime opportunity to be in position to win another. Out of all the No. 1 seeds in the 2015 NCAA Tournament, the Blue Devils have the easiest path to Indianapolis. Duke opens in Charlotte and will play either San Diego State or St. John's in the Round of 32. You want more? The 4 and 5 seeds in this region are Utah and Georgetown, two teams that have been inconsistent at best during the last month. While the bottom half of the South Region has some star power with Iowa State and Gonzaga, it would be a real shock to a lot of people if Duke isn't playing for the right to go to the Final Four in a regional final.

    We all know the NCAA did that deliberately because they love Duke. We know it deep in our deepest soul. Don't try to convince us otherwise.

    Hang on, I think I'm receiving a signal from Uranus...

  • FiveThirtyEight, the stats blog, gives UK a 41% chance of winning it all. I'll take that. Don't miss KYvampyre's Log5 analysis here, we are a little bit less of a favorite using that method.

  • Ira Combs says that Las Vegas hasn't established a team as an even-money favorite in over 20 years.

  • Kentucky, #1 in height, too, relishes the view from on high. They come to the conclusion that it's the Minnesota Timberwolves, not the Portland Trailblazers, that are the only NBA team taller than UK:

    Though his point was taken, on this specific nuance he was wrong: The N.B.A.’s Trail Blazers are not as big as Kentucky. Nor are the Lakers, the Thunder or the Cavaliers. According to a calculation by The New York Times, counting players who played at least one quarter of a game’s minutes on average, the Minnesota Timberwolves, after some midseason trades, were the only N.B.A. team taller than Kentucky, whose oldest regular player is 21.

    Hat tip: UKsprinter

Other Kentucky sports
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College football
College basketball
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Other news

  • Planet Mercury, space oddity.

  • Nokia's patent infringement lawsuit against Apple gets thrown out. These tech companies are among the most litigious in any sector.

  • The new MacBook's single port comes with a major security risk:

    But while the new port is powerful, it also comes with serious security problems. For all its versatility, Type-C is still based on the USB standard, which makes it vulnerable to a nasty firmware attack, and researchers are also concerned about other attacks that piggyback on the plug's direct memory access. None of these vulnerabilities are new, but bundling them together with the power cord in a single universal plug makes them scarier and harder to avoid. On a standard machine, users worried about USB attacks could simply tape over their ports, but power is the one plug you have to use. Turning that plug into an attack vector could have serious security consequences.

    This is nothing new, really. The moral of the story is, don't use a USB if you don't know where it's been.

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