It’s hard to believe, but Big Blue Madness, the official start of the Kentucky men’s and women’s basketball seasons, is just two weeks away. To get you ready for the season, we’ll be posting a men’s or women’s blog post each and every single day leading up to Big Blue Madness. We’ll have excerpts from Q and A sessions with head coaches John Calipari Matthew Mitchell, video interviews with the men’s basketball players and an extensive women’s basketball preview. On the final day, the day of Big Blue Madness, we’ll have a live blog with a men’s and women’s basketball player. Make sure you check back each day for your daily UK basketball update. And remember, we’ll have coverage for you all season long.
Question: Talk a little bit about the schedule.  Calipari: The schedule is harder than it was a year ago. We have tougher road games. It’s a tougher schedule. Our league is better. You’ve got two teams that will be in the top 10 above us in both Florida and Tennessee, I would guess. Georgia is going to be way better than people expect to understand. We’ve got to play all those guys twice, so that’s six games, so that’s a tougher schedule. Question: How important is it to play in Maui and play three games on national television?Calipari: It doesn’t matter. I’m coaching at Kentucky. Whether it’s ESPN or CBS or whoever it is, we’re at Kentucky. We’re on 21 times. Now we’ll be on 19. It doesn’t matter. TV, we’re going to get TV. This is totally different than what I’ve had. My job when I was at Massachusetts and Memphis was ‘Get us on TV. Play anyone, anywhere at any time. Build a schedule, nonconference, that’s going to get you a one seed. That was my whole mission.’ I’m here now. A lot of the schedule was already there. Then if you really want to add to that, you’ve got to make sure you have a veteran team. You can’t add to it with a young team. And then the second part is the built-in league play where you have no idea (how the other teams are going to be). The good news is it’s not football; it’s not five years ahead. You can do it that summer. You can see the league is going to be real good. If the league were good on the other side, real strong, and you’re only playing six games, three of those at home, it’s totally different than your side where you’re playing six or eight games. Plus, you’ve got to go over there. Mississippi State is going to be really good. You’re going to have teams over there now that are much better, too. So-and-so wants to do an all-access. ‘Nah, no.’ Now when I was at Memphis and Massachusetts, I’m calling them to do the all-access. You have to understand, at Memphis we had six league TV games – for the league. Now five of them would include us, but how in the world did you get to 16 and 15 games (on TV). How did you do that? We scheduled, that’s how we did it. How many do we have here? We have 21. What? No wonder everybody hates us.Question: Back in the day, coaches would build the schedule and think that it’s going to get us there in March. Has the business end of things changed and the way the tournament is seeded changed things?Calipari: I used to be mad at Syracuse because (head coach Jim Boeheim) played all home games. And he plays all New York schools. It was ridiculous. And then you find out they were making $800,000 and he was told, ‘You’re playing at home.’ Well, you’ve got a similar situation here. They budget how much you’re going to make in basketball based on your home games. Obviously, the fundraising is tied to our basketball tickets and it drives what’s going on here. You can’t just say we’re going to do this and this. My team at UMass, we were 35-2 when we lost to Kentucky. You have to understand we only played I believe nine home games. The rest were road games or neutral games. In the history of our sport that’s never been done. I believe we played nine home games. It may have been max 10. It was like a ridiculous number of neutral (games). You say, ‘Why would you do that?’ Because on a home game we made $90,000. On a neutral game we made $100,000. My AD is like ‘I don’t care (where you play).’ We go and played Kentucky to open the season, got $100,000. We played in the Rainbow Classic. That was three games. We played Georgia Tech in the Meadowlands. We played somebody in Springfield. We played somebody in Worcester. We played Boston College in Boston in a neutral event. We were on the road, boom, boom, boom, plus you have your league games on the road, and then your NCAA Tournament games are on the road. At the end of the day we played like no home games.Question: You know people are going to think you’re trying to pad your home record by playing all the home games you can. Calipari: Well, you have to here. They can think what they want. And anybody that knows my background knows, how can you say that? We’ve played everybody. But, in this sense, we’ve got an athletic department. We’ve got a volleyball team, we’ve got a baseball team, we’ve got a softball team. If I’m not mistaken, we have more sports than any other team in the league. This basketball program has to generate dollars. We have no choice. So if I went to Mitch (Barnhart) and said, ‘We’re going to play 13 home games,’ he would say, ‘You’re out of your mind. Tell me what I’m going to do with these three sports I’ve got to cut.’ You can’t. You’ve got to play these home games. And you want them to be as good as possible, obviously for seeding purposes. You’re playing at Louisville and at North Carolina and Maui. Now think about what that did. My first thought was, no disrespect for Maui, I’m worried about this program. How do we get this schedule right where they get the money they need (and) the fans get what they want to see? The good news is our league. I’ve had to do this without the league behind you. When I was in the Atlantic 10 we had a couple of teams. When I was in Conference USA we had a couple of teams. Here, you’re not bringing in any bad teams. Every team in this league can play and is well coached.Question: When you add a walk-on like Jarrod Polson, is the idea that he’s a four-year guy?Calipari: No, because he’s in a dogfight every year and there may be other walk-ons better than him. I’ve given walk-ons scholarships in the past when I’ve had them, if I think they’re good people and I think they’re going to be good teammates. Some of those walk-ons have ended up being pretty good players. He was in Canada. I feel comfortable putting him in the game. There will be games he’ll be overmatched physically and all that, but he’s bigger. It’s not like he’s 5-10 now. He’s a little bit bigger. He’s just thin. Question: You talk about scheduling a certain way with a young team and scheduling a certain way with a veteran team, but are you ever going to have a veteran team at this rate?Calipari: Well, if the rules don’t change, if we’ve recruited and developed – it’s not just recruiting. Look, Eric Bledsoe, Daniel Orton and even DeMarcus (Cousins), a few guys thought early on, ‘You’re out of your mind if you think he’s one and done,’ and John Wall, who they said was out of control, was too wild, turns it over, is he a point, is he not a point guard, what is he? So you have to develop. If you do a good job in judging who you’re bringing in and developing them, after a year it’s hard for me to try to argue with a kid, which happens, to tell him he needs to stay, so I can’t tell you that. But I will tell you that Chris Wilcox was (projected as) a four-year player, didn’t start for Maryland, didn’t start his second year for Maryland, sixth game they start him, they go on a run, they win the national title, and he’s the eighth pick of the draft, still playing in the NBA today. (He went) in two years. They thought he was a four-year guy. Darius Rice, everybody thought he was one and done and went to Miami. Now, you could say, ‘Well, I went to the wrong place.’ I don’t care. He was a one and done. He stayed four years, so you don’t know. You’re looking at guys on my team that somebody may say they’re one and done. But what if they’re not? They haven’t played yet. We don’t know.Question: But does the structure of the system, though, dictate that inevitably you’re going to have a down year because of that? Maybe more guys leave than you expected.Calipari: Well, you better manage the roster, which I think we’ve done a pretty good job of. You’ve got to manage the roster. You know, the old thing of saying that it’s OK – ‘Well, you don’t at this time have a scholarship. How did you do that?’ I’m trying to manage the roster. If you have a good idea and you try to fit it in, that’s what we try to do. There are all things that can happen.