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Kentucky Wildcats Morning Quickies: Florida State Edition

News and commentary from around the Big Blue Internet. Kentucky hoops easily handles Morehead. Football heals, prepares for Louisville. More.

By Glenn Logan
Kirby Lee-USA TODAY Sports

A gunman opened fire on Florida State’s campus in Tallahassee, wounding three. He was shot and killed by the police. Thank heavens no innocents were killed, but being wounded by gunshot is a sure ticket to a bad day. Our prayers go out to the injured for a swift and complete recovery.

Tweet of the Morning

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. This is one of those times.

Your Quickies:

Kentucky football

  • The team is starting to heal up, and that is nothing if not good news. If UK can go in full-strength and invigorated against Louisville, I think we have a chance. If we had to play them this weekend, I think we’d get soundly beaten. Stoops thinks so, too:

    "I don’t really want to get into that list right now. It’s deep," coach Mark Stoops said Wednesday. "I’d like to stay away from the details of that as we game plan and prepare for this next game, but we’re significantly banged up right now. So this bye could not have come at a better time for us. We’d have really had a hard time fielding a quality team this week, if we had to play this Saturday, that’s for sure."

Kentucky basketball

  • Eric Bledsoe’s love for Kentucky is clouding his reason, I think. I wish we could stop this idle speculation about UK beating NBA teams. We don’t play any NBA teams. I want to think about Texas, and North Carolina, and Louisville, not the 76ers.

  • Kentucky a big winner in the recruiting wars of last week. Well, duh. The rest, you’ll have to pay to see. Sorry, I don’t subscribe.

  • Bill Self says it will take a "special effort" to beat Kentucky. Really, a hot 3-point shooter would go a long way. If Kentucky can learn to fight over screens and force guards to drive rather than shoot, UK will be really, really hard to beat.

    Kentucky’s biggest enemy is complacency, and I know a lot of people don’t believe this now, but it will rear its ugly head more than once. That’s why UK is unlikely to go undefeated — you can’t guard you’re own head, and players’ heads at this tender age are notoriously hard to keep on task.

  • The Harrison Twins’ sacrifice, according to Adam Himmelsbach. Minutes aren’t going to hide the Harrisons from the NBA, or anyone else for that matter. Calling this a "sacrifice" is suggesting these guys have some kind of right to expect a certain number of minutes, and I reject that notion.

    What frustrates me is guys like Himmelsbach imputing ulterior motives to Calipari. Of course he wants the twins to succeed, but that’s really on them as much as it is on him. I have seen, even on this blog, and annoying lack of recognition of what the Harrisons have done well, which is put terrific pressure on defenses. The other side of that coin is execution, which they have unfortunately not managed to do well enough. I think that changes this season despite the fewer minutes, because it allows them to focus on smaller chunks of the game.

    Tyler Ulis is very good, but trust me, if Andrew went down, you would miss him a lot. Ulis doesn’t put near the pressure on a defense that Andrew does.

  • Bye week interviews with the coaches, and Bud Dupree.

Other Kentucky sports
College football

  • The calls for an expansion of the College Football Playoff have already begun. Anyone surprised?

  • How to avoid the college football coaching hot seat. This was hilarious:

    So at Florida, the Main Thing is to make everyone feel like you are not going to get in the way of the winning, that you will let the winning happen. And if you can do it in a flashy way and score a lot of points, even better. Be cool. Be humble. Be tough. As a random example, don’t be a yelly, inexperienced defensive-minded meathead. That is someone who appears to get in the way of the winning.

    Read the whole thing.

  • Kentucky will never lose (*). Until they do, of course. You know, we keep hearing about the first half against Buffalo. Nobody talks about the second half, where we allowed them 14 points.

College basketball

  • The art of scheduling — the imperfect science behind building the perfect schedule. Speed is important. That’s how Tennessee wound up facing very tough VCU early in the season this year, because of the coaching change.

  • A reminder of an article Ken Pomeroy penned for Basketball Prospectus talking about the impact of height on the college game. Consider:

    It should be no surprise that a team’s average height does correlate to its offensive and defensive prowess. On the offensive side, average height has a correlation coefficient of .27 to adjusted efficiency, and on the defensive side it’s .38. For those new to correlation, a value of 1 would mean that variation in height would explain all the variation in efficiency. A correlation coefficient of zero means that the two values are entirely unrelated. So in layman’s terms, there’s a relationship between height and efficiency on both ends of the floor, but it’s not very strong. In addition, the relationship between height and efficiency is stronger on the defensive end.

    Kansas got a pretty good look at the defensive correlation on Thursday, I’d imagine. Hat tip: Fox Sports

  • Hey, we should try getting high-fives from the officials. If Gonzaga can do it …

Other sports news
Other news

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