Warning: Baiting Kentucky with Trash Talk Will Result in Utter Embarrassment

CLEVELAND — John Calipari’s eyebrows said it all.

Calipari marched through the Quicken Loans Arena tunnel at halftime Thursday night and into the hallway leading to the locker room. He spotted Kentucky athletic director Mitch Barnhart and the two didn’t exchange a word. Calipari simply raised both eyebrows halfway to his hairline as if to say, “Whoa.”

Uh, yeah. Whoa.

The score was 44-18 and Kentucky had just made a good team—a very good team—look as if it should be playing lunchtime pickup ball against the guys from accounting. It's amazing, in a way, that the eventual 78-39 Sweet 16 slaughter of West Virginia actually taught us something new about Kentucky.

We figured we knew it all about these Wildcats after 36 wins. They’d shown us a roster packed with superstars can indeed play as a team without bickering over minutes. They’d shown us a perfect season is realistic.

And now, in win No. 37, they’ve shown us what this team is capable of doing to an opponent that antagonizes it.

Thank you, Daxter Miles Jr., for helping teach that lesson. Miles, West Virginia’s starting freshman guard, ended any hope of the Mountaineers escaping Sweet 16 humiliation approximately 32 hours prior to tipoff.

Andrew Weber-USA TODAY Sports

Miles’ best line on Wednesday (via his mouth): “Salute to them getting up to 36-0, but tomorrow they’re gonna be 36-1.”

Miles’ second-best line on Wednesday (again, via motormouth): “To me, they don’t play hard.”

Miles’ best line on Thursday (via the final stat sheet): Zero points, zero assists, zero steals, zero blocks, one rebound. Shocking that the Cats allowed him to grab that rebound.

“I guess they woke us up,” Kentucky guard Aaron Harrison said. “We were super motivated. … The added trash talk was fuel to the fire. We wanted to go out and make a statement to them and the rest of the country.” 

Andrew Weber-USA TODAY Sports

Harrison continued: “We consider ourselves the best guards in the country. For a team to say they can press us and we won’t be able to pass the ball, that was really dumb and ridiculous.”

Ridiculous, for sure. As was Miles’ postgame interview. His first eight answers were, “Kentucky played great,” even when the answer did not match the question. It was the best game he played all night.

Meanwhile, Kentucky players also suffered a bit from the parrot syndrome, repeating the same thought over and over again. But they all used different words and ways to say do not provoke us.

“I don't want my team playing angry,” Calipari said. “I don't want them to be mean, nasty, hateful, I don't want that. It's not us against the world. ... When it's not going good and you're mad and you're trying to elbow and all of a sudden you miss a shot, your physiology is real close to fear. They may have said we wanted to win by 50, but they won because they were focused on how we had to do it against this team.”

There was a certain venom in the air, though, and not just on the court.

As Kentucky led by laughable scores of 18-2, 30-9 and 42-15 during the first half, UK fans treated each possession as if it were the last of a tied game. They went ballistic on shaky calls and on the rare occasion of a Kentucky miss, they groaned and grumbled in unison.

They wanted blood as much as the players, and no lead was large enough. It was as if the ol’ Hatfield-and-McCoy brouhaha began bubbling up again between the neighboring states. Infuse that energy into an NBA team stuck in college for a year, and it will hold an opponent to 24 percent shooting in front of the entire country.

“We said it when we came in at halftime: Step on their throats, don’t let them back up,” UK forward Willie Cauley-Stein said. “... We were like, ‘We’re not stopping. We’re going to continue to play hard since (Miles said) we don’t play hard.’”

Saturday’s Elite Eight opponent, Notre Dame, could be Kentucky’s toughest in the NCAA tournament. The Irish are experienced and confident, and they play extremely well together. They are terrific passers and shooters, and they move without the ball perhaps better than any team in the nation.

We already know these things about Notre Dame. We will learn more about Notre Dame’s judgment on Friday, when the Irish will be asked a zillion questions about Kentucky.

Just a suggestion: Be very, very complimentary.

Derek Samson has been an editor and writer in the sports media industry for nearly 20 years. He has worked at Yahoo Sports, USA Today and Sporting News, among other outlets. All quotes for this story were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.