John Clay's Sidelines

Five notes from Kentucky’s meeting with the media before practice today, in preparation for Tuesday night’s game at South Carolina:

• Bonus point: John Calipari said that with the team being No. 1, he will stress that people will look at them differently now. Some players will go from homely to handsome a hunk. “From Cutler to Clooney,” said one media member — think it was WTVQ’s Dan Rieffer — which brought a huge laugh.

• 1. Patrick Patterson said that it will take a team defensive effort to contain South Carolina’s Devan Downey. Eric Bledsoe, John Wall and DeAndre Liggins will get the man-to-man assignments in trying to stop the 5-foot-9 dynamo, but the rest of the team has to be concious of the way Downey gets the ball to the rim. That means big men have to help.

• 2. Zone? John Calipari says his team could play some zone on Tuesday night. Cal said that watching the tape he had seen other teams use a zone to try and keep Downey out of the lane. Calipari said don’t be surprised to see him use a litte of that, as well. But mainly Cal said he knows that Downey will get his points. The trick is to keep Downey from making the players around him better.

• 3. No. 1. Calipari repeated that the team wanted to be No. 1, and surely that explained some of the motivation behind the 101-70 rout of Arkansas. The trick now is to deal with the ranking. Calipari kept hammering home that the South Carolina arena will be full, that media requests will be through the roof, that the atmosphere will be charged. Daniel Orton said he didn’t think the atmosphere would be a lot different. Opposing crowds were charged up before, when UK was No. 2-4 in the rankings. Will No. 1 make that much of a difference? The Carolina crowd is a little different in that the students are right down near the floor. And they were camoflauge.

• 4. Big Cuth is growing up. On the SEC teleconference, Calipari said that DeMarcus Cousins did get his chipped teeth fixed over the weekend. And with the local media, Calipari marveled at how much Cousins has grown. If the big man had taken an elbow to the mouth, thus chipping two teeth, earlier in the year, it would have been “a tooth for a tooth,” said the coach. Here’s what I noticed Saturday: In the second half, while UK was shooting free throws at the other end, Cousins slapped palms with Arkansas guard Courtney Fortson, the player whose elbow adjusted Cousins’ dental work in the first minute of the game.

• 5. Rolling the balls out there. Calipari repeated that he’s not a long practice coach. He wants his players fresh. He’s not a long film-study guy either. He also said he’s not big on scouting reports. (Sounds like the anti-Pitino.) Calipari joked “so you guys can write that he just rolls the ball out there.” Yet Calipari also said that friends are calling him to remark on how much the fun the team appears to be having on the floor. Somehow, I think the two are related.