(H-L photo/Mark Cornelison)
Big Blue Links for Wednesday:
- In the Herald-Leader, Jerry Tipton writes on seasoned-veteran Mike Dunlap, the St. John’s assistant who will be subbing for the missing Steve Lavin when the Red Storm play UK at Rupp Arena on Thursday night. Meanwhile, I rank the SEC football coaches on job performance for this season. Plus, Beverly Fortune writes on a task force report that says a renovated Rupp would meet UK’s needs and save the city money. Cats Stats looks at UK being No. 1.
- Kieran Darcy of ESPN New York writes that St. John’s is determined despite Lavin’s absence. Six of the seven players in St. John’s rotation are in their first year of college basketball. In fact, Dunlap said that he won’t even give his team much of a scouting report on the top-ranked Cats. He’s more worried about his own team knowing what to do.
- Steve Jones of Cats Illustrated visits UK signee Alex Poythress in Clarksville, Tennessee and finds that the 6-foot-8 forward works part-time at Wendy’s. He’s making $7.25 an hour.
- Jody Demling of the Courier-Journal reports on Louisville women’s easy 105-62 win over Murray State as the Lady Cardinals tune up for Sunday’s game at Kentucky. Louisville scored the game’s first 16 points and held Murry ato 17.9 percent shooting in the first half. The Kentucky-Louisville women’s game is a sell-out, by the way.
- Guy Ramsey of Cat Scratches writes that the UK volleyball team wants to bring fire to its trip to the NCAA Tournament. UK plays Dayton on Thursday in College Station, Texas in the first round. UK coach Craig Skinner and Dayton coach Kelly Sheffield are natives of Muncie, Ind. and Ball State graduates.
- Eric Lindsey of CoachCal.com delivers a UK basketball practice report. He writes, “To work on toughness, the coaches brought out pads in practice about a month ago to get the players to play through bumps. In the drill they went through Tuesday, the player starts from underneath the basket, fights through one defender in the paint, gets the ball on the elbow with a pad-less defender, breaks him down on the dribble, passes off to the other wing, gets bumped as he shows for the ball at the free-throw line, receives the ball back at the top of the key, and then drives past the pushing of two defenders with pads. Sounds exhausting, right? It is. But it’s a great drill to teach toughness.”
- Ethan Levine of the Kentucky Kernel writes that Kentucky’s defense closed strong and is looking forward to next season. Georgia may have been the turning point. The Cats held the SEC East champs to just 19 points and forced four turnovers. “We didn’t have anything to lose,” sophomore linebacker Avery Williamson said. “It was a huge game for us. We knew that if we lost this year it would just devestate the whole team. We had to go out (on top).”
- Mark Berman of Fox Houston writes that ex-UK star Patrick Patterson made the most of his opportunities during the lockout. After three years of problems with bone spurs in his right ankle, Patterson had surgery to deal with the problem.
- As you might have guessed, the Battle of the Blues exhibition game has been canceled.
- Bleed Blue Kentucky has news of a Florida wide receiver who is visiting UK this weekend.
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