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Billy Gillispie wants to have a four-team, round robin tournament at Rupp Arena feature current and past University of Kentucky head coaches John Calipari (Kentucky), Tubby Smith (High Point), Rick Pitino (Iona) and Gillispie (Tarleton State).
Here is an excerpt of a recent interview with Gillispie:
1. Coach Gillispie would “love” to bring Tarleton State to Rupp Arena to play Kentucky. Truth be told, when we were coming up with our questions for this interview, we were excited to talk about all of them, but this is the question we REALLY wanted to know the most. With Rick Pitino already having said publicly he would like to play Kentucky, would Coach Gillispie want to as well? His answer exceeded expectations: “We could actually get all 3 of us together and Tubby and just have a round robin tournament and just play for 3 or 4 days.” He also noted, “everybody would have to get some cough medicine because they’d be booing 3 of the 4 coaches. They’d need somebody to take care of their throats.”
Let me just say I am ALL IN on a round-robin tournament with UK, Iona, High Point, and Tarleton State. If someone in the UK Athletics Department isn’t working on this right now they should all be fired. I can’t think of ANY game that would excite season ticket holders more than that. Can you imagine: Cal vs. Rick, Cal vs. Billy, Billy vs. Rick, Billy vs Tubby, Tubby vs. Rick, and Cal vs. Tubby all played out over a weekend?
2. Coach Gillispie confessed that he did not have enough talent during his tenure at Kentucky. When asked about what it was like to coach at UK, Billy had a very telling reply in which he said “there’s nowhere better in the world to coach than Kentucky when you have the players, and when you don’t have the players there’s probably nowhere in the world that’s tougher.” What exactly did he mean by that? Well, I don’t think he was implying that he didn’t have enough TOTAL players, as there were 18 players on the roster in his first season (If you remember the names Kerry Benson and Dusty Mills you are a True Blue fan).
I think you can interpret this in a couple ways. This could be him saying that when he arrived at UK the cupboard was bare from the end of the Tubby era. While there was a decent amount of talent his first year (Bradley, Crawford, Patterson, Meeks), by his 2nd year, it was clearly a 2 man show where Meeks and Patterson would have to carry the load every game without much help.
Or maybe this was an admission on his part that he was unable to recruit at the level needed to win at Kentucky (PPat was the only 5-star recruit of the Gillispie era). Either way, I found it very interesting that Billy basically admitted that he didn’t have the talent it takes to win at an elite level.
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