Category: Chenault

Story Memo

Following our meeting on Thursday, I’m still really interested in both of my story ideas but I’m worried about my personal connections in the horse business and that they might cause some interference. I think it could be a interesting story but I don’t want the lines to get blurred.

As for my other idea about the guarantees of the SEC with scheduling the big games. I obviously talked mostly about basketball and that’s what sparked my interest. But I could widen it to other sports or just focus on basketball. With this story, you said it would be a lot of phone work and I don’t mind doing that.

I want to focus on the pros and cons of scheduling these big games, but I want to address how a school decides to play another. Whether it’s for money reasons (Nichols State getting paid to come to here and play UGA football) or other reasons. With UNC / UK that’s been a long standing rivarly game in basketball and I’m interested why Roy Williams wanted to end that. I could try and contact UK and see how they feel about this change.

I think there will be a lot of numbers involved with this story and think I might need to use some graphics to help organize and show my facts more clearly.

Surprising

As y’all know I’m a huge Kentucky Wildcats Basketball fan, so what I find surprising is that Roy Williams wants to terminate the UNC/UK basketball games by 2018. How does one decide they want to stop a long coming rivalry? Is it a mutual agreement? do both of them have to agree on the subject or can one coach just say that enough is enough.

As far back as I can remember, my dad would always let my twin brother and I fight over who got to sit with him at the UNC/ UK game whenever it was at Rupp Arena. The Cats don’t play the Tarheels every year and in the off year that they don’t play each other, the Cats will usually play Duke or another top 25 team who is not in the SEC. Every year when they release the non conference schedule, I’m always eager to see who the Cats are playing. For instance, the Wildcats normally play the Louisville Cardinals right after Christmas, either the following day or three days after, but this year the game has been moved to December 21st.

The whole scheduling process confuses me in sports. How do they decide who plays who each year. As mentioned above, UNC and UK don’t play each other in basketball every year but when they do they alternate home courts. Why not just play every year?

Here is an article I found about Roy Williams wanting the UK/UNC games come to an end by 2018. And here is a second article about scheduling that addresses why the UK/UofL game has changed dates for the first time in years.