Keep It In Your Pants, Kentucky

This Billy Donovan business has gone way past the point of being absurd by now. The state (and general commonwealth area apparently) of Kentucky, long known for their "passionate" (read: rabid) fan base when it comes to basketball, gave Tubby Smith such shitty treatment--you know he's won a f'ing national title right?--that he picked up and rolled to Minnesota. Minn-e-freaking-sota. It's cold as balls in Minny, their mascot is the Golden Gopher, and they play in the Big Ten, which, pardon me or saying so, is boring and kind of sucks. Why doesn't he just come back to High Point U and coach his alma mater? Seriously--it's not that far of a reach.

But I digress--the point here is not what a downgrade of a job Tubby was willing to take because the fans are such lunatics, it's the fact that the University of Kentucky had the gall and stones to announce, during the week of hoopla before the Final Four, that they were going to offer Billy Donovan close to 3 mill a year to leave Florida and come to Kentucky. If the season were over, I don't have [that much of] a problem with this. Kentucky considers themselves the most important school to the sport of college basketball, and even if their consistent over-seeding doesn't completely prove them wrong, I don't take issue with at least letting them go on believing whatever they want. But, first off, we're talking about a fellow SEC school. Granted Donovan coached with Pitino there, so there's a clear connection, but the only time you should be allowed to go after a coach in the same conference as your school is if 1) he's an alumni of your school and 2) if the University that he currently coaches at is basically trying to run him off (I call this the TOB rule).

Instead, we have Billy D, who an basically do whatever he wants in Gainesville, less than eight hours away from coaching his team towards back-to-back title games and possible National Championships. So maybe Kentucky is just jealous? Do they blatantly want Florida to lose this game (or the next) even though it would mean plenty of shared revenue for the SEC, and at least give some credence to the notion that the SEC isn't a faded power conference? (Note--I'm not saying they are, but it's not the ACC we're talking about here, kids.) Who the fuck knows. All I do know is...

KEEP IT IN YOUR PANTS, KENTUCKY. Just wait one more effing week before you let the world know that you're going to try and hire Billy Donovan away from Florida. And not just because it's the right thing to do, or because trying to jinx an arch rival school like this is just Bush League, but because I'm sick and tired of having to listen to eight straight hours of "Should He Stay Or Should He Go...Now" yamming as every single talking head out there prattles on about their personal opinion on whether Billy should take the job or not.

NO ONE has mentioned that what Kentucky did is just sad and we're so busy being caught up in Donovan's response that we can't see there's literally zero way for him to win in this situation. He's doing the closest thing he can to not saying anything that commits one way without shutting a door, and that's all he can do. If all his guys leave for the NBA, screw it, go coach Kentucky if that's what you really want to do--it'd be a huge mistake considering that he owns the program in Florida and, as Dickie V pointed out, all of his close family has just recently moved to Gainesville. Billy is just going to pull a standy, get-me-a-huge-raise move by briefly considering the swap to Hicksville before cashing in on a big payday/lifetime contract in Gator Country.