When Upset Meets Obsession
Billy Gillespie couldn't ask for a worse start as the new head coach for the Kentucky Wildcats. I'm sure he was prepared for most of it: the insane expectations, the unparalleled scrutiny and the insane focus the media in Lexington, Kentucky puts on that basketball program (and hey, I've lived there and there isn't much else there to get excited about.) He probably wasn't expecting to get fried by that same media for not wearing blue during the first exhibition. Welcome to Kentucky, coach.
The color of his dress may have seemed petty, but that story is nothing compared to the shelling he is going to take after actually losing (badly, I might add) a home game to... Gardner Webb? That sort of loss won't play well in any town, but it's going to lead to a furious hellstorm of criticism in the land of the bluegrass. Basketball in Kentucky is not like sports fandom in other places. You may think your local team has local passion, but Kentucky basketball is a different sort of animal. I can count on one hand the other places in the nation where that sort of sports passion is rivaled (not coincidentally, fans of those teams are all equally hated by others.) Gillespie needs to be counting problems to fix on this team before the bottom falls out on his public support in Kentucky, because it can happen quickly and irrevocably there.
It is, in some ways, Pitino's fault that the current berserk expectations on the UK basketball program are so insanely high. Pitino, as everyone knows, cultivated a culture of winning at UK, resurrecting a team that had briefly lost that culture. Pitino's name is nearly synonymous with God (or Satan, depending on which city you are in) in Kentucky for that and his subsequent return to Louisville. Having him slowly building a championship dynasty two hours down the interstate doesn't help matters for Kentucky coaches. It's going to put an extreme amount of pressure to win now at UK, something that surely had a large part with Tubby Smith being fired. Certainly Tubby didn't help matters with his chilly relationships with players and slow, perhaps outdated method of basketball he ran at Kentucky.
Regardless of the reasons and politics of Tubby's departure, Gillespie needs to quickly get his team in shape or the same fate will assuredly befall him. To his credit, he is saying all the right things right now and squarely taking the blame... a strategy that will play well for the Kentucky media, but only for so long. His assessment in the post game was also dead-on correct: his team has a lot of fundamental problems that were exposed in that game, and those sorts of failures always point back to the coach.
Gillespie does have the tools to get over this and build a solid winning season. All reports on him are that he is a relentless workaholic who focuses solely on his job. He has good athletic talent on this team, especially Joe Crawford (who was woefully misused and underutilized in his years under Tubby,) and the remarkably scrappy and underrated Ramel Bradley. Of course, along with the downside of the pressure and media obsession that Kentucky basketball brings, he will also enjoy the immense recruiting power of the position to build for the future. If performances like the one against Gardner Webb continue, however, he may quickly find himself removed from that possible future.
