Photo: ESPN.com
John Calipari made waves around the Big Blue Nation yesterday when he said his team was “not real coachable” and that they had their “worst practice in four years.”
Coach Cal took to his website today to change his opinion on his young team:
I refuse to believe they don’t have the fight in them to do this. I refuse to believe they aren’t coachable. I refuse to believe either one of those because we’ve got good kids.
There has to be a reason why guys are walking out of timeouts and not doing what they are supposed to. I may say publicly they are “uncoachable,” but I refuse to believe that because I believe in these guys and I believe they can change. I say it to get them to change, to prove to themselves and others that they can do this.
I’ve had teams get beat like we did yesterday that came back a little mad, a little ticked off and said they weren’t going to let that happen again. They didn’t win every game, but they didn’t let something like that happen again. Are we really going to let go of the rope after one loss like that? It is just one game.
This comes back to, you either take the fight to them or they take the fight to you. Historically my teams have always taken the fight to the other team. Our job now, as a coaching staff, is to get our guys to believe in that and do it again.
Will the Tennessee catastrophe be what finally wakes up this team?
If it was, I wish they would have gotten embarrassed a long time ago.
