Between the time Fred VanVleet’s shot bounced off the rim, the backboard
and onto the floor to the time John Calipari did his postgame press
conference and finally got on the bus, Coach Cal’s phone didn’t stop
buzzing.When Calipari checked his phone, he said he had 100-plus
text messages, more than half of them from friends telling him they had
just watched the best college game they had ever seen. (There’s no
telling how many more voicemails he got.)After reading about 30
of them, Calipari stopped, stood up on the bus and asked his players if
they were getting the same thing. Unanimously, they said yes.”I
said, ‘Did you, like, realize that when we were playing?’ ” Calipari
recounted on his weekly radio show on Tuesday. “And they’re like, ‘No.’
And the rest of us didn’t either. We were just trying to play the game.”Time
will ultimately decide just how good Sunday’s game really was — though
there’s little disputing that it was a classic and the best of this
year’s NCAA Tournament thus far – but the Calipari’s Kentucky Wildcats
(26-10) will have little time to revel in their best and most thrilling
victory of the year.With archrival Louisville (31-5) next in
line on the hopeful journey to the Final Four, UK, believe it or not,
has an even bigger stage to tackle.”Wichita was probably playing
as well anyone in the field,” Calipari told radio show host Tom Leach.
“Now, with us, who’s left, who do you think I would tell you I would
tell you is playing as anyone in the field?”Rhetorically, the answer is Louisville.”That’s
just the truth,” Coach Cal said. “When you watch them, they’re being
aggressive, their physical play, the bump and grind of it, they’re
pressing, they’re up in you. It’s all the stuff that makes them
aggressive, and they’re playing well.”Louisville actually
struggled in its two NCAA Tournament victories, coming back from a late
deficit against Manhattan to avoid an opening-round upset before
grinding out an ugly win against a strong St. Louis group.But
great teams pull out good wins even when they don’t play well, and
Louisville certainly fits the criteria of a great, if not elite, team.The
defending national champions have won seven in a row and 14 of their
last 15. During that streak, which dates all the way back to Feb. 1, the
Cardinals have won by an average margin of 22.9 points per game,
including victories over NCAA Tournament teams UConn (once by 33 points
and the other by 14 in the American Athletic Conference championship
game) and Cincinnati.UK won the regular-season meeting vs.
Louisville, 73-66, at Rupp Arena, but both teams are far different than
the ones that met on Dec. 28.U of L no longer has Chane Behanan
down low, who was dismissed from the team just days after the loss to
UK, but Montrezl Harrell has stepped up his absence, transforming into
one of the premier big men in the country. Luke Hancock was still coming
back from an offseason injury during the team’s first meeting and has
just recently returned to his Final Four Most Outstanding Player form of
a year ago, while Russ Smith has continued to score at a high rate.Throw
in the fact that the Cardinals have rounded their defense into their
typically stifling postseason form – they lead the country in turnover
margin thanks to 10.1 steals per game – and UK, just as anyone would
expect, has its hands full with fourth-seeded Louisville.”Do you
really think you’re not going to play against somebody who’s not good
(at this point)?” Calipari said Tuesday. “Every team’s good.”UK is also significantly better.Though
the Wildcats won the first meeting behind James Young’s 18 points and
10 rebounds and Andrew Harrison’s solid point-guard play, they played
nearly the entire second half without leading scorer and rebounder
Julius Randle, who spent most of the final 20 minutes in the bowels of
Rupp Arena receiving treatment for leg cramps.Since then, UK has
taken several lumps – seven more losses, to be exact – but the Cats
have obviously turned things around in recent weeks, punctuated by
Sunday’s victory over the previous undefeated Wichita State Shockers.”Why
were we ready for all this adversity? Because we went through a
gauntlet this year,” Calipari said, noting UK’s second-ranked strength
of schedule. “As we struggled, oh, the onslaught of criticism, oh, the
personal attacks, oh, the agendas came out. … And these kids never broke
up. They stayed together, they kept believing, they kept believing our
staff. So which team in this tournament has been through that like us?”Not many.Calipari
was able to turn things around in recent weeks by taking blame for his
failure to coach his players in the way they needed to be guided. Once
he realized he needed to change, he made the celebrated and unsolved
“tweak” before the Southeastern Conference Tournament and then another
tweak before NCAA Tournament play.Now – you guessed it – there’s
one more tweak. Calipari’s calling it the “three-tweak,” and it’s being
made just in time for Louisville.”All these have been based on
us, but this one’s also based a little bit about how that other team
plays — some things that they do that we’re tweaking some of our stuff,”
Coach Cal said on the radio show. “Because you know what? You’ve got to
keep people on their heels a little bit, and so we’re going to go with
the three-tweak and see what happens.”Calipari planned to
institute the third tweak with his team on Tuesday night in the first
practice since Sunday’s game. The Cats will leave for Indianapolis on
Wednesday and practice in the evening while they’re there to get their
bodies and minds acclimated to the approximate 9:45 p.m. start.”What
time do you think it will start?” Calipari said, hinting at the fact
that the game will tip even later because of the preceding
Michigan-Tennessee game. “I mean, we’re going to be playing until 1 in
the morning.”Practices will continue to be physical this week, Calipari said, because that’s what’s worked so well recently.”We’re
going to stay with what we’ve been doing: physical practices,” Calipari
said. “Grab. Hold. Guy tries to get open, put two hands around his hip.
The guy drives, put your hands up in the air and hip check him. That’s
what we’ve been doing. So we’re doing it this week.”There’s a
notion that the pressure is now off UK and squarely on Louisville this
week because of the disappointment the Cats endured in the regular
season and the subsequent breakthrough against Wichita State. Coach Cal
doesn’t want his team to have that mindset of relief.”Losing stinks,” he said. “Like, really stinks.”So
Calipari wants to win on Friday and keep the turnaround going, but he
also doesn’t want to lose sight of what this experience is all about,
and that’s to have fun. Calipari said that goes for both fan bases and
told listeners on Tuesday to enjoy this week and not be nasty with rival
fans.”I’m proud of them,” Calipari said of his team. “You got a
lot of guys with smiles on their faces. And you guys that have listened
to me every year, you know I say we have to have more fun than the
other team. Bottom line, you’ve got to have more fun. The last game I
kept saying, don’t make the game bigger than it is. It’s just a
basketball game.”Try telling that to the people that will text Calipari if Kentucky wins again.”This
is a time to enjoy all this,” he said. “Don’t be anxious, don’t be
uptight, don’t–just enjoy the ride and what’s going on. A lot of you are
going to Indianapolis. Well, have fun.”To bring you more
expansive coverage, CoachCal.com and Cat Scratches will be joining
forces for the postseason. You can read the same great stories you are
accustomed to from both sites at CoachCal.com and UKathletics.com/blog,
but now you’ll enjoy even more coverage than normal.