All Calipari Needs Now Is Tim Riggins
Friday morning, University of Kentucky coach John Calipari put to rest the rumors that he’s leaving the Wildcats for any number of NBA openings next season by tweeting that he’s staying to finish what he started – which, presumably means, he’s got a handful of future NBA Rookies of the Year left to usher out of college basketball.
Either that, or he meant that he still hasn’t finished the rest of “Friday Night Lights” Season 4.
Fans of the show will note that NBC’s Friday night drama aired its second episode of the season, in which Coach Eric Taylor holds a late-night practice in hopes of wooing back his team that had quit on him. The reverse is true at Kentucky, of course, as the rumors have been that the team has been charged with the wooing lately. But stick with me.
Coach Taylor’s ragtag bunch of misfits show up and humor another one of his lump-in-the-throat, uber-earnest motivational speeches in which he renews his faith in the team, the school and their ability to compete as one cohesive unit.
Here’s Taylor’s culminating message from Friday’s climactic speech (check out the 2:30-mark of the scene for additional flavor)
Who wants to finish this fight? Who will finish this fight with me? … The players all begin ceremoniously tossing their jerseys into a bonfire on the field. Let’s finish it. Let’s finish it. Let’s FINISH it. Let’s finish it. Let’s finish it.
About eight hours before this episode, Calipari basically made the same speech – albeit limited to 140 characters and without the curious ceremony of igniting school property.
If you’re a “FNL” fan, this is probably pretty cool. If you’re a Wildcats fan, it might be a tad alarming. Calipari, after all, is getting paid almost $4 million a season – you’d hope that he’d borrow his inspirational words of appeasement from a program that isn’t on the verge of being canceled.
That’s just bad jeux-jeux.
But Calipari posted that message Friday morning and the show aired at 8 pm EST – who’s ripping off who?
Firstly, the current season of “Friday Night Lights” aired on DirectTV last year. Secondly, as mentioned two inches above, Calipari makes enough loot that not splurging on the satellite service to watch the episodes early shouldn’t have even entered his brain. And thirdly, skipping the first run of this underrated drama would be unthinkable. Why? Well, the hot, hot, hot cast for starters. And for enders, where else would Calipari come up with his nuggets of inspiration, if not from Coach Taylor?
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