some interesting perspective from Mitch from an interview in 2007
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Is your coach on the hot seat......
I was getting a lot of requests from people to comment on Kentucky basketball. And I felt like I wanted people to understand we were paying attention to it. And we clearly understand the frustration, but we also are clear to, you know, that we'll work at it at the end of the year to figure out what we need to do to be better _ to get where we want to be. With the understanding that, you know, fourth in our division is not where we want to be. And, you know, 8th seeds _ although we're in tournament _ not probably where Kentucky's used to being. So, those are things. I think people read way too much into it, but I wasn't going to sit down with every person individually and I wasn't going to sit down with every television radio station or media person individually. I wasn't going to answer every e-mail individually. So, I just globally wanted people to understand, look, we're paying attention. We'll do, we'll make the adjustments at the end of the year we need to make, and we'll get on with it. By not saying something, everybody, I think would have thought we didn't care or we weren't paying attention to the things that were going on in our program.
asked about approaching Tubby to change assistant coaches
We're always going to try and get better. And Tubby and I have talked about, you know, what do we need to do to be better? Those are conversations we have all the time. That's no different than I do with any other coach. You know, we sit down with all our coaches at the end of the year - what have we done well, what have we not done well, what do we need to do to make the progress we want to be? Our goal in this department, across the board, is to achieve the five things we talk collectively and the principles of our program. There's five things in there. One of those five things is competitiveness, and we talk about competing for championships. Not just SEC championships, that's the big championship. That's the goal is to do that in our sports programs, and we're gaining ground on that in a lot of our sports programs. Basketball's had the good fortune of having been there seven times. That's a little bit of a stage for them - a standard, not a stage - a standard for them to have to aspire to that's a little different from the rest of our sports programs. We do that. This is our operation - the way we run our operation - is very similar from sport to sport. It doesn't vary from track to baseball, from soccer to rifle, from football to basketball. We're pretty consistent in the way we run those, and the expectation levels and the way we operate year in and year out, the way we treat the adjustments we need to make is pretty consistent.
on Fan criticism
I don't think you could be in our business, I mean you could sit here and say that it doesn't get to you. Whether sitting in this chair as athletic director, or head basketball coach or head football coach. I think you get a little numb to it at times. Having said that, you hear it. What bothers me most is people can be so disrespectful to people as human beings. I feel bad for coaches when they're not treated as human beings. I think that there's, I want people to be treated well. There's a way to do things right, and there's a way to not do them. I think the goal is to treat people well.
