John Clay's Sidelines

Quick one today as Kentucky prepares for Wednesday’s game in Hogville:

• Oh, the road. The Cats are back on the road. Danger! Danger! In his portion of the media meeting, John Calipari said he thought that for the most part his team had played well enough to win on the road, even if it has won just one road game. Doron Lamb said the team needed to carry over their good play at home, especially in the 90-59 thumping of South Carolina on Saturday, to road games. Lamb said the team’s confidence was up.
• Calipari again defended his decision to go with his starters-plus-one through about 38 minutes of the Cats’ crushing of the Gamecocks. Cal pointed out that the team had lost big leads in earlier games, including against Mississippi State the game before. Asked if he now expected to get nothing from his bench, Cal said, “We’ll see.”
• Cal said he didn’t get to see the Kentucky-Arkansas wars of the ’90s, but said his UMass team did play Arkansas the year the Razorbacks won the national title in 1994. Turns out, he was close. Arkansas actually lost to Calipari’s UMass team 104-80 in the Tipoff Classic the next season. The Razorbacks went on to lose to UCLA in the national title game that season. And UMass would make it to the Final Four the next season, 1995-96, where the Minutemen lost to Kentucky in the national semifinals.
• Cal actually said what he remembered about Arkansas was the Arkansas-Texas football game in 1969. Cal did cancel the Arkansas-Memphis basketball series when he was coaching Memphis. He said he wanted more national match-ups, and less regional match-ups. Cal said he would canceled Memphis’ series with Tennessee, but the Vols were giving Memphis $2.5 million to play football.
• Back to Doron Lamb. He did say that that this was part of the season that you have to fight through. The freshman are not used to having played so many games at such a high level. He said he has been getting treatment to help with aches and pains.