By Jamie H. Vaught
KySportsStyle.com Magazine
NASHVILLE – No. 9 seed Arkansas had a comfortable 20-point lead over No. 16 seed South Carolina in the early second half in the first round of the SEC Tournament Wednesday afternoon, but the Razorbacks had to hold off South Carolina’s stunning comeback before winning 72-68.
Arkansas, now 20-12 overall, will face No. 8 seed Ole Miss on Thursday. The 1:00 p.m. ET matchup will be shown on SEC Network. South Carolina finished with a 12-20 mark.
First-year Arkansas coach and former Kentucky boss John Calipari was asked about the game. Arkansas was without injured Adou Thiero, the team's leading scorer.
"At this point, you want to win games," he said. "I'll look at the tape and figure out. But I just thought we got tentative and was trying to get out of the gym. You can't play that way. We have a bunch of guys that compete and did what they had to to win the game, so I'm happy. Would you like to have it a big score? Yeah. But at this time of the year, everybody's fighting for their lives. South Carolina, in a different league, they're good. They got big guys. They got guards. I mean, this league is unforgiving."
Calipari isn't sure his team's narrow victory will be enough to get an at-large berth to play in the NCAA Tournament next week.
"I don't know. I'm not in the room," said Calipari.
Calipari recently said he didn't care much for the SEC Tournament but he said that's not really true.
"Not quite. Every tournament we go in, we're doing it for one reason: We want to win games to
build up our seed," Calipari explained during the postgame press conference. "Now, along the way, for a guy that does not care about conference tournaments -- I'm guessing it's15 or 16 -- if you don't care, the kids don't care, no one cares, then I'm a magician. How about maybe you're taking the pressure off the kids? This is just another thing for us to get better and improve ourselves. Then along the way, you know what, you're reaching for stars, you grab a moon, all of a sudden you're standing there with the trophy. So yeah, it matters. We got to play.
"Now, there was another coach in this league that said I'm not sure I really want this tournament because last year we got a guy hurt in it. I'm not sure how I feel. You're going to ask him that same question, aren't you? His team was one of the best teams in this league. He's saying, We got a chance to win a national title. This league has been a meat grinder. Is it going to be any different here? No. We want to win every game we play. ... It would be nice to win it again.
"I don't know exactly how many of those we've won. How many? Somebody told me 87 tournament games. For a guy that doesn't care (smiling), I think it is. I don't know. You'll have to look. They tried to tell me yesterday. I don't know. I think it's about almost 80 percent win. For a guy that doesn't care. Should be a lot of guys not caring."
During his Hall of Fame career, Calipari's teams have won a total of 15 conference tournament titles, including six SEC tourney championships while at Kentucky.
Jamie H. Vaught, a longtime sports columnist in Kentucky, is the author of six books about UK basketball, including recently-published “Forever Crazy About The Cats: An Improbable Journey of a Kentucky Sportswriter Overcoming Adversity.” Now a retired college professor who taught at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College in Middlesboro., he is the editor and founder of KySportsStyle.com Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter @KySportsStyle or reach him via email at KySportsStyle@gmail.com .
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