Everything John Calipari said before Kentucky men’s basketball’s NCAA Tournament opener

March Madness has arrived for John Calipari and the Kentucky Wildcats.

UK, a 3 seed, opens the 2024 NCAA Tournament on Thursday night at PPG Paints Arena in Pittsburgh against 14 seed Oakland, the Horizon League regular season and tournament champions.

UK had a five-game winning streak snapped in its last game, a disappointing defeat in the SEC Tournament quarterfinals to Texas A&M. The Aggies scored 97 points in just 40 minutes against the Wildcats in that game.

Now, the pursuit of a potential ninth national championship begins for the Cats.

Ahead of that NCAA Tournament curtain raiser, Calipari met with media members on Wednesday afternoon in Pittsburgh to discuss the Wildcats’ first-round opponent, how Kentucky plans to shake off that SEC Tournament defeat and more.

Here’s everything Calipari said on the eve of the start of the NCAA Tournament:

Q. John, the obvious question are your feelings coming home to coaching in your hometown, but I’m also interested in the Pitt recruiting class of 1988: (Sean) Miller, (Jason) Matthews, (Bobby) Martin?

I have a picture in my office in Kentucky that I’ll put out. I’ll take a picture and send it out to you and you can get it. It’s all those guys, and they’ve all stayed in touch. What a great group.

Q. How were you able to get all them to come at one time, and do you regret not getting to coach them?

Sean was like family. Darelle (Porter) always wanted to come. As a matter of fact, we signed him before he took an official visit. Now, he was from the city. Bobby wanted to come to Pitt, Brian Shorter I had known since he was — and Jason Matthews wanted to come to Pittsburgh. I went to L.A., and Paul Evans did a great job of recruiting him, too, now. He was the head coach. That was an interesting — you know, let me tell you why — just listening to him, how many of you are from Pittsburgh? Yinz? Downtown? (Laughs).

I mean, come on, the crick. We had a crick in our backyard. My mom used to say, red up. Like red up. What is red up? Like, clean up. Red up. Do you know what a gum band is, like a rubber band? It was gum band. A pop? I never knew, they said are you going to have a soda? What are you talking about? Pop? I mean, let me say this about Pittsburgh. When I grew up, it was a blue-collar town, but it’s never changed the roots of what Pittsburgh is and what it’s about. The Steelers are still ... I call them the Stillers, as in Pittsburgh Stillers. They’re still a blue-collar team with fans who love them and, like, where I grew up, my high school teammates are still my best friends. They still come to games and they say, you know — anyway.

But we were all brought up the same way. Our fathers were laborers. Mom raised us, and put hope and dreams and you can be whatever. That was Mom. But we were all the same. It was a melting pot. And, you know, you were taught, there’s nothing in this world that’s going to be given to you. You’re going to have to go take what you want, and if you don’t work, you will not eat. That was the famous line, you don’t work, you’re not eating. You work. If you want to be better than somebody, you better work. That’s Pittsburgh. And it was the greatest thing. And I think sometimes — anybody that’s been here and left knows that’s what it is, and also, yinz and all the other — how about this word? Jagoff. Come on, where else do you say jagoff other than Pittsburgh? And when I say it, they go, oh my — did you hear what he just said? In Pittsburgh, that’s like in passing.

So, no, I appreciate that. And I love coming back. I’ll probably take the tour of my grandparents’ house and my other grandparents and our house where I grew up and the high school and my aunts and uncles and cousins, and I normally come back and I do the whole drive. But a special place. I called (Steelers head coach) Mike Tomlin. Why don’t you come in and talk to the team? Mike and I are friends. He’s in a pro day somewhere, can’t do it. But special place.

Q. You’ve had a number of guys over the years who have been in a similar situation of D.J. (Wagner) and Justin (Edwards) coming in top recruit, projected NBA lottery. How do you think they’ve managed those pressures and expectations?

I think they’ve done great. I mean, my job is to help them walk through this. And at the end of the day is I just want them being their best, and when I’m with them every day, I know what that looks like. But when they’re playing against other guys, they know what it looks like, too. Most of it for young guys, and again, I’ve got the youngest team in the field, I will tell you is the mental part of this. Can you be a cheerleader for yourself? What is your inner talk? They have to learn that.

You have to push out anything that’s coming at you negative. Anybody’s telling you, well, if you did this and did that. Doesn’t help. Both of them — D.J. being hurt and sitting out two and a half weeks really affected him. He’s come back. He’s better. He’s back to where he was. He was the Freshman of the Week four times, and then he took two-and-a-half weeks off and it’s taken him time. Justin, I could not be more proud of any player I’ve ever coached. To know where he was, to know the expectations that were on his shoulders, to know all the stuff he was hearing. And I said, Justin, I just want you to know, I believe in you. And he said, Coach, I want you to know I believe in you and I’m sticking with this. And that’s — and then he makes it. We don’t win at Tennessee if he doesn’t play that way.

Now, here’s the thing with all. Guys, they’re not machines and they’re not robots. They have bad games and they have bad nights, and it’s what they are. The good thing about this team I’m coaching is we have a deep team. For a couple years, if one or two players played poorly, I didn’t have subs. You left them in and you end up losing. And I’m not just talking the NCAA Tournament. Other games. With this group, if these two or three are not playing well, I’ll just play these five or six, and we’ll run with them. And they know it. We’ve had — I believe it’s seven guys hit 25 or more points, and nine or 10 or maybe even 11 have had 13 points or more. We got that type of team. But we’re really young.

And then your next question, someone from Pittsburgh, yinz don’t play very good defense. That will be your question to me. At times, yinz do play good defense, and there are other times you’re like what are you thinking? But I’m loving coaching this team. I mean, this practice today — and all I’m telling them is you make sure I’m having as much fun as you. So we’ll see. And there’s no guarantee in this tournament.

And let me say to everybody, forget about seed and all that stuff. If you win on a half-court bank shot by one, you celebrate because you’re surviving and marching on. That’s what this tournament is. You don’t let everybody come at you, you gotta do this, you have to do this, if they don’t do it this way. Go ahead, have your fun. This is about survive and advance. And we’re playing a good team now in Oakland. They’re good.

What they do defensively, what they can do offensively with two kids taking 20 threes every game and having the freedom. Greg is a great coach, not a good coach, a great coach. And then they play funky defense. They play a defense that’s not normal. And I’m not — I’ll tell Greg, Greg, we’re not changing much. So when you watch what we do against zone, that’s what we do. I’m not trying to be tricky. Here’s how we play. I don’t want them thinking too much. I want them playing. Let’s just be who we are. And let’s see if that’s good enough.

Q. It feels like when you guys have a lead, there’s a lot of passing, a lot of up tempo, and when you’re behind there’s more dribbling, more one on five.

Reed Sheppard said to me, Coach, I’m not sure we’re selfish, but I think we have so many good players, each guy is trying to get us back in the game himself, and we’re just not as good when we play that way. Now, we talk about it, but there’s game slippage and they revert back to their habits sometimes, and that’s both on offense and defense. Look, I’ve had video. We did highlights to show them, here’s when we’re at our best. Here’s when we’re not. And most of that is we hold the ball. But they’re not robots, they’re not machines. They don’t play — there’s stuff that you’re teaching that they miss on.

You know, you talk about the pressure of this tournament. It’s on everybody. You got more than anybody else, and Reed has more than — no, it’s on everybody. And how you deal with it is how have you done throughout the year when you’re down? Have you ever been down 36 minutes and came back and won the last four? Have you been up, they make a run and you gotta make another run? All that stuff adds up to the experience a young team like ours needed.

Q. You talked eloquently about the blue collar, if you don’t work you don’t eat. You have players, highly talented skilled players that come in and your program has the best of everything. I mean, that’s the way that it is. How do you instill that blue collar work ethic that you need to win? And I’m not saying they’re spoiled, but they are certainly well taken care of.

Well, most of them are fighting for their families. That’s why you come to Kentucky. Can I do some humble brag up here?

So 70 percent of the players who accept a scholarship with us get drafted. Seventy percent. Of that, 73 percent get to second contracts. The guys in the league right now have made over four billion, not million, billion dollars, and when you talk Bam (Adebayo), (Tyrese) Maxey, Devin (Booker), De’Aaron (Fox), Shai (Gilgeous-Alexander) is going to make 400. I mean, it’ll be six billion in the next two years. You come to Kentucky to prepare yourself for the rest of your life. You don’t come for NIL, even though you saw our managers got NIL deals.

So yeah, it’s all neat, but that isn’t why you come. And you learn to be a great teammate. You know why? You gotta share. You’re not going to be told you’re going to start, how many minutes, how many shots. That’s why there are kids that will never come here because sometimes they think there’s an easier path. There is no easier path. And these kids live in the gym. We have a machine called a NOAH machine that’s over the top of our baskets. Ours is a training facility, not really a basketball practice facility. It’s a training facility. When they walk in, their face recognition, we all know how many shots they’ve taken, when they’re missing, why are they missing. And they come in there and they live in there.

Tyler Herro lived in the gym. He lived in there. So did Shai. They were, again, fighting for their families. And in these kind of tournaments they understand you’re fighting for each other. You fight for each other. You do this together. But if anybody comes here and then tries to get soft, you don’t play. And the guys that live in the gym,that played for me, those guys, of the Michael Kidds, the Anthony Davises, those guys, the Brandon Knights. I can go on and on. Living in the gym. They’re the ones that busted through. Most of it, they made it happen.

We have a stage for you to go show what you are, but they’ve gotta do it. I tell them all the time, I don’t have a magic wand. It isn’t that. It’s the culture. It’s the process. It’s being a great teammate. How about this? Why would good players want to play together when they know they have to share? Because really good players want to play with other really good players. If you’re not so good, you want to be the man, the main guy until they play box-and- one, triangle-and-two, and every defense is stuck. I’m not having any fun. It’s hard when they’re looking at you and saying we’re stopping you. Hard to do when you have a full team. I don’t know if that makes sense. Was that even what you asked me?

Q. Coach, you guys were knocked out of the SEC Tournament pretty quickly to Texas A&M. What is your message to your team to try to bounce back off that loss and make a run here in the tournament?

A lot of teams got beat early in their tournament. We just happened to be one of them. So let’ s go. We got more rest. I took them bowling. We went bowling. Who was the best bowler we had? Everybody said Antonio (Reeves) because they know he bowls. He didn’t. It was Tre (Mitchell). Tre never told anybody he was a bowler. Bowled over 200. We split them up and let them compete and laugh and eat.

Now let’s regroup and get back after it. I mean, you won’t believe this. There are teams and sometimes it seems to be against us, the team plays their absolute best game against us. And you lose. But you learn from it. You win or you learn. We learn. We move on. And let’s go. And me being the coach, probably at my age now hurts me more and it takes me a little more time to get over it. But when it’s done, it’s done, I move on and let’s go. My job right now is to just, one, every year, make sure they’re playing their best basketball in March. Second thing is take it off them, take it on your own shoulders.

Let them be young players and let them play and have fun. And the third thing is to make sure they’re focused about being together and connected. So — but I’m not the only coach doing that. It’s every coach trying to do. They want their team in March to be at their best.

Q. I know you talked a lot about Pittsburgh, but I’m curious, you personally growing up in the ‘60s and ’70s, some of your favorite memories, any of the Pittsburgh professional athletes you kind of idolized or anything like that?

Yeah, and we were Steeler fans. I never got — somebody said, did you go to a hockey game? Where would we get the money to go to a hockey game, or the Steeler game? My uncle Joe had two tickets for his whole life when no one was going. So he kept them and I think I got to go to a Steeler game one or two times with him. And the Pirates, everybody went to opening day and mobbed Three Rivers Stadium. There would be 60,000 and the next game there would be 3,000.

And I don’t know how I got in there, but my memories, the Immaculate Reception, you know, which is a ball hit against the Oakland Raiders that, you know, I mean, I was a Bill Mazeroski fan all the time. Forbes Field, which is up in (the) Oakland (neighborhood of Pittsburgh), they have the plate still there. And he hits the home run to beat the Yankees. Clint Hurdle and I were great friends. Mike and I have been great friends. So I get to come up here and really watch and do it. And my high school team made the playoffs for the first time in 30 years. Moon High School. That was a big deal, and New Castle beat us. Made me mad.

But, you know none of us had much but we never did without. I mean, you know, I’m not trying to say I walked uphill on the way and on the way back. I mean, it’s what it was in Western PA. But I wouldn’t want to be with any —where I was, we never had a credit card. Anybody ever do layaway here? You do layaway? OK. That’s how we got Christmas. We laid it away for four or five months. Shoot, we did layaway for furniture. Like, it’s just how it was. Mom and dad weren’t going to have a credit card. We weren’t going to owe anybody. So I don’t have a credit card. Yes, I do. Thought I would just say that.

Q. John, you haven’t really coached in Pittsburgh since the ‘80s, but it’s very clear that your passion for the area and love for the area is still very real?

And my time at Pitt was special for me. It’s when I first got my first full-time job. You know, coach (Roy) Chipman hired me. Coach Evans kept me. And then I got hired by a school that I don’t think anybody wanted the job. That’s why I got it, UMass. But yes, I do. And Pitt is special to me.

Q. What about your roots here just continue to be so important to you all these years later?

It’s where I grew up. It’s where — my dad is no longer here. My mother passed away in November of 2010. But my sisters aren’t here, but I have aunts and uncles and cousins and family and friends, and my teammates, some of them live around here. You know, Pittsburgh is just — how can I say, it’s such a small city. It’s just not like a city-city. And you have areas. North Side, South Side. You know, you have out in Aliquippa. You have a different — it’s a melting pot of everybody. My dad worked at J&L Steel for a while. My family worked with A&S Railroad and American Bridge and all that. They went through that. My dad worked near the blast furnace, said he had to stop and he ended up going to the airport working for Allied Aviation which fueled the planes because he said if I stayed there I was going to die. I was near the — you know, he was losing 10 pounds a day. But that’s — you’re feeding your family. You want your children to have a better life than you had. That’s what Pittsburgh was and is. I love going to the Steeler game and seeing the fans.

They’re like my neighbors. They’re — you know. And probably put up a lot of money to get tickets, and they go and they are — sometimes it’s like Kentucky fans. They are engaged, and if Mike loses, they’re engaged. It’s how it is. I mean with those kind of — that’s why — I love the fans at Kentucky. A good friend of mine said to me, look, everything has become negative. You can’t talk to each other anymore.

Now it becomes what’s the nastiest thing and say. That’s why I just say to my team and myself, I gotta just ignore and know it’s where things are, but I’m not going to let it affect me and how I do my job, because I’ve got people’s children. Their precious child I’m coaching. So I’ve gotta stay focused and I’m trying to get them to stay focused. Last one. You notice my answers are short.

Q. We just talked with (Oakland coach) Greg Kampe, your good friend, before you came in here and he was pretty strong in advocating for the tournament to not expand with some of the proposals on the table. What are you thoughts on that and does it dawn on you that this could be the last time there are 68 teams in the field and it could be even bigger next year?

I hope it stays where it is. You know, I know people get mad. They get mad at the committee. You won’t believe this. I’ve been mad at that committee a few times. But you may be mad because of your seed or where they’ve shipped you to. I’ve said go the S-curve the whole way down and rank them one through 68 and go like like that.

Well, we can’t because of this and leagues and all that. But it doesn’t matter who the committee is. We’re all going to be upset. You know who’s going to be upset now and I love it? Football coaches because it don’t matter that it was four and there are two that are mad. Now they’re going to how many? So there are going to be 18 that are mad. And it’s part of the NCAA Tournament not getting in, getting in, bad seed, good seed. I always say this. When you give a good team a bad seed, it’s not them you’re screwing. It’s everybody they play that shouldn’t have to play that team that early.

And so it’s part of what it is. Let’s keep it at — it’s too good a thing. It’s the event. Like you could tell I’m excited about coaching in this. Yeah, I’m excited about being home. But they could have sent us to Spokane. I already talked to (Gonzaga coach) Mark Few. I was going to stay at his house, watch his dogs. I was good if they sent us there. But here, I’m trying to make sure what I did today at practice, I had a bunch of friends at practice. They saw and I wasn’t looking, I was practicing. Got to take some pictures, done. Now we play a game. This is a business trip for me. And I’ll say everybody that’s in this thing, I would say they’d say the same thing.

Keep it where it is. Don’t mess with something that’s great. And the committee, literally don’t care. Whoever is on it is going to get the same grief, that this group got, the last group got. It’s what it is. No science to this. You’re going to make some mistakes. Thank you.

Everything that Oakland coach Greg Kampe said before NCAA Tournament game against Kentucky

Kentucky must do these three things to make a deep run in the NCAA Tournament

John Calipari, Barack Obama talk March Madness. The former president likes Kentucky a lot.

Let’s enjoy the NCAA Basketball Tournament before the corporate powers ruin it

Kentucky basketball: Five things to know about the Oakland Golden Grizzlies

How No. 3 seed Kentucky and No. 14 seed Oakland match up — with a game prediction

Where to watch, how to follow Kentucky’s 2024 NCAA Tournament opener vs. Oakland

How far will Kentucky go in the NCAA Tournament? National experts offer their predictions.

Who will advance to the Final Four? Nearly 30 experts give us their NCAA predictions.

Kentucky’s ‘silent assassin’ gets one more chance. And this time, he’s a different player.

2024 NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament TV schedule and channel guide

Here is the schedule and a printable bracket for the 2024 men’s NCAA basketball tournament