Expectations high, but different, for Florida, Kentucky
ARLINGTON, Texas — The last time Kentucky was here at AT&T Stadium, its 67-62 loss to Baylor on Dec. 6 set off panic attacks in Big Blue Nation. At Florida, which lost to UConn just a few days earlier, fans were far more concerned about whether football coach Will Muschamp was going to be fired.
Though Florida and Kentucky are two of the sport's premiere programs, both winning national titles within the past decade, they illustrate the divide at this Final Four between a football-centric school that excels at basketball and a program whose fan base burns with hoops intensity 365 days a year.
While John Calipari complained this season that Kentucky was the "most overanalyzed team in the history of the game," Billy Donovan's fans may or may not know when or against whom the Gators play their next game. While Kentucky fans took over Indianapolis last weekend for their Elite Eight game against Michigan, Florida fans were outnumbered in Memphis by Dayton supporters.
That doesn't make either approach good or bad. But one of the reasons Donovan and Calipari have been so successful at their current schools is that they've embraced the nature of their program, and to a large extent, their fan bases.
While Calipari excels in being the center of attention, not just in the state of Kentucky but in all of college basketball, Donovan has never worried about his program being overshadowed by Florida football.
In fact, it could even be seen as an advantage, particularly in November and December as his team's identity is being formed.
"I'm pretty much just trying to evaluate my team and coach (them)," Donovan said. "We all can get distracted on different things. If football season is going on, that doesn't have any impact on me and what I'm doing. I'm going to try to be locked in to figure out how can we get better in the weight room, individual instruction, coaching, what we need to do."
That isn't always easy when scrutiny surrounds a program the way it does at Kentucky, where each win or loss is a referendum on Calipari's philosophy of building a program and each player gets constantly evaluated against his recruiting ranking.
Though Calipari always has had a gift for shaping narratives around his team, he's spent an inordinate amount of time this season fighting the suggestion that Kentucky was underperforming.
In the end, Calipari's faith was rewarded with a run to the Final Four, but it didn't make the criticism in January and February any less intense.
"It took us four months," Calipari said. "So now they've got it. They're young; it takes time. You cannot skip steps. We all want to skip steps. We all want freshmen to be sophomores and juniors. They're not. It just takes time. There were people saying, 'Well, Cal's not having any fun.' I was having a ball with this team. Now, I had to be really aggressive. I had to raise the standard and say this is not what's acceptable. But I always believed in the team."
Over the years, Donovan has had the luxury of being celebrating when he's competing for championships and largely ignored when things weren't going well with his teams, especially during the two-year stretch in 2008-09 when he was going to the NIT and the Florida football team was competing for national titles.
Having a fan base that won't go crazy at the first sign of trouble is certainly helpful when Donovan puts together a schedule like he did this season, playing early road games at Wisconsin and UConn, both of which Florida lost.
"I think when you play in those situations, you learn about yourself," Donovan said. "That early in the season, we're all trying to get to know our team better, to see how we respond against high-level competition. You're also trying to get somewhat prepared for your league play because you know you're going to go into some difficult places to play. I thought those games were really helpful to our team moving forward."
Though Calipari has the same philosophy of using early season games to learn about his team, he has systematically tried to alter the schedule to include more neutral-site games and move away from home-and-home series except for the annual meeting with Louisville.
But that certainly didn't help when Kentucky lost to Baylor here in December and a narrative started to form that the Wildcats weren't living up to expectations.
"It's Kentucky. It's what you buy into," Calipari said. "If you want to coach at Kentucky or play at Kentucky, you (know) there are some guys with agendas. It's that program. It's part of it."
