Billy "Backdoor Classic" Packer out as CBS head douche nozzle

Surprisingly, google gives me only one response for the search Billy "backdoor classic" Packer, and an unrelated at that, which saddens me. I think he said it during a UNC-UK game a few years back, and always thought that, given all of the inappropriate gay-overtoned quotes he has produced, this should be an unheralded entry into his quote Hall of Fame.

Jesse Helms is dead, and Billy Packer is out at CBS. It's a great year to be a human being.

Cats for Pistons

Matt Jones explains how Tayshaun Prince singlehandedly gave the commonwealth its NBA team.

Patrick Patterson a Wildcat

My first ever blog post dealt with Randolph Morris presser announcing his decision to come to Kentucky over Georgia Tech. Kentucky fans can certainly debate the disappointment of the "greatest recruiting class" of Rondo, Crawford, Morris, and Bradley, but the Billy Clyde era is here, and there will be no Lot's wife pillar-of-salt action going on here. There's momentum to match the tradition.

KentuckySportsRadio is farked right now, but Matt Jones and company streamed the press conference via cell phone (beautifully low tech), and PPat's barely discernible garble of "University of Kentucky" brought appropriate Kentucky screams in the Huntington High gym, about thirty minutes from the house where I grew up. Now if the kid even remotely lives up to the hype...

Eat shit, Florida. Eat shit, Billy Donovan. Long live Billy Clyde!

Exiting the panic room

I've tried to avoid turning Sparkgrass into a basketball blog, as others do that much better, but I'll just state my extreme satisfaction with Billy Gillispie as a super choice to lead the Wildcats helm. He wanted the job as soon as his name was mentioned, and he wins fast. Of course, the latter worries me that a bunch of NCAA violations will pop up, since it's a little unreal that he could turn UTEP and Texas A&M each into strong programs in the twinkle of an eye. But if this guy's for real (and he probably is), we're all in for some fun times. And maybe, just maybe, a Kentucky-Florida rivalry will be restored with the stakes even so much higher.

The Kentucky job is still one of the top 5 in college basketball. But the top 5 jobs in college basketball are no longer so much better than the top 20 jobs in college basketball to expect someone to leave one of those posts. Roy Williams left Kansas for Carolina because he was a Carolina kid at heart, the same reason that Bob Huggins made yet a bigger ass of himself and left KSU for West Virginia. Huggins is a Mountaineer and a douche nozzle at heart, and so he left all of his promises to his #2 recruiting class in the nation to go home. Heck, Ben Howland left a sweet job at Pitt for UCLA not just because the UCLA is a top 5 job, and the Pitt job is a top 25 job, but because he was a UCLA kid at heart.

Billy Donovan wasn't a Wildcat at heart. He was an assistant coach under a former coach, and an assistant coach at the same time as another assistant coach who just got pushed out of his head coach position by the psychotic wing of the Kentucky fanbase. He had a nice link, but growing up in the same conference, he'd had plenty of time for the mystique to weather. Billy Donovan can do no wrong in Florida. He'll pull a Denny Crum or a Bobby Knight. He'll win for a few more years (10-15?), and then spend his twilight years directing a mediocre program. No one will care, because he put Florida on the map. That's special, and good for Billy Donovan. Kentucky should be proud that we had something to do with developing the hottest coach in the nation, even if we can't claim him as our own.

Morris heading to the Knicks

I'm slow on the draw, and every Cat fan knows that RaMo had 1.6 million reasons to leave. Plenty of griping going on, but I just wanted to put my two cents in to the world: good for you, Randolph.

Thanks for all the fish.

WTF???

Tubby Smith leaving Kentucky for Minnesota.

Didn't actually see that coming, because I didn't imagine Mitch Barnhardt was that inept as an AD. Does that leave us anywhere with Patterson or Lucas?

The best of times, the worst of times

According to Pat Forde (who is apparently the only guy at ESPN I find worth reading, or at least quoting:

KENTUCKY (8)

Best case: Randolph Morris and Joe Crawford reach previously untapped reservoirs of passion, Ramel Bradley quits throwing the ball away and the Wildcats surprisingly pull out of a two-year tailspin by upsetting Kansas and reaching the regional final. Fans at least halfheartedly chant "Tub-by! Tub-by! Tub-by!" after every victory. Back home in Rupp Arena, Louisville loses in the first round.

Worst case: Fans chant "Tubby Must Go!" after phlegmatic Cats bow out against Villanova, their seventh loss in the final 10 games. To their dismay, athletic director Mitch Barnhart stands by his man for another season. Morris and Crawford go pro, hotly pursued recruits Patrick Patterson and Jai Lucas go to Duke and Oklahoma State, respectively, and Rick Pitino takes Louisville to the Final Four again.

Word on the street is that Patrick Patterson reads a lot of message boards and the such (maybe that's just the anxiety of those of us who worry about what retards say on those things). So, Patrick, if you happen to run across Sparkgrass, know that the rational wing of the Kentucky Wildcat Nation will be throwing huge parties on the day you join us, and wearing blue and black instead of blue and white for weeks if you don't.

Same goes for you, Jai. But the rumors don't tell us that you read blogs and message boards quite as fervently.

Note: I claim exemption from delusions of grandeur when I think that there is an infinitesimally small chance one of these guys would run across this page. That infinitesimal chance is more than enough

Salt, Meet Wound

I always appreciate Pat Forde's ability to make Kentucky fans want to slit their wrists:

Tubby Smith. NCAA winning percentage: .700. He's lost only one first-round game, and that was at Georgia back in 1997. Took Tulsa and the Bulldogs to the Sweet Sixteen, and has gotten Kentucky there six times. Caveat: Hasn't gotten Kentucky to the Final Four since 1998, and the Wildcats are looking at the longest Final Four-less streak in school history if they don't make it this year.

Forde was a sportswriter at the Courier-Journal before his time at ESPN, so at least he has witnessed the moral depravity of Kentucky fandom at its lowpoints.

Go Vols!

Not to minimize the implicit rivalry between Kentucky and Tennessee, but as long as Bruce Pearl doesn't pull a Rick Stansbury and make a habit of saying stupid shit about Kentucky, stunts like this will only make me love the dude. (Stolen from ESPN.COM)

Go Cats!: Touching the Top 25

After losing at home to the most enigmatic team in the SEC (Vandy = 12-6 overall, 3-1 against Sagarin top 25, 4-2 against top 50 ... aka WTF, mate?), Kentucky will drop out of the top 25 (not that the coaches even let them in to begin with). Take heart, Mr Sagarin knows we're still Top 25.

CatPol: Proof that Bush hates America

Daniel at Kentucky Democrat blogs that Bush's speech tonight about his bumbling new disaster of a plan for getting more Americans needlessly killed in Iraq could very well cause a delay in the broadcast of tonight's Kentucky versus Auburn game.

Clear proof that George W Bush hates America, or at least Kentucky.

Didn't Kentucky elect Mitch McConnell solely because he was supposed to be able to stop this sort of shit from happening? We have the most conniving (McConnell) and most incompetent (Bunning) Senators left in the capitol building, and a lot of good it does us, when Kentuckians can't see their Cats play.

With ESPNFullCourt, my coverage of the game will not be interrupted. But a Kentucky ex-pat understands true bluegrass values better than you might think. Kentuckians skip church for ball games. I have no reason to think they wouldn't skip wars for ball games as well.

So maybe the entire Iraq War is really just an attempt to bolster the cable companies' ability to sell more college basketball subscriptions. That somehow seems less dirty than whatever real justification Joe Klein is puking out this week.

I impart Bo to use his connections in the Fletcher administration to condemn Bush's use of time sanctimoniously set aside for the playing of the Cats. The Cats don't play tomorrow. He can talk then. Or yesterday, you're telling me he didn't know what crap he was going to pull on us yesterday?



Disclaimer: Yeah, I'm kidding. Except about Joe Klein. You should have seen the part I had about Bush being almost as bad as Eddie Sutton. But even I'm not THAT shrill.

UPDATE: The Herald Leader: Basketball or Bush? Tonight, you have to pick

Go Cats!: Eddie Sutton is a rotten, classless bastard

Sutton takes a few potshots at Kentucky while talking to some folks at UK.

Eddie Sutton = alcoholic piece of shit.

NCAAF: Why it's so warm in Michigan (for December, of course)

Hell is freezing over, so the heat is being pumped up to Michigan.