Kentucky ready for early morning, noon game at Georgia

DrewFranklinKSR

noon-games-clock-getty-images — (Photo: Nora Carol Photography via Getty Images)

Tomorrow’s contest in Athens is Kentucky Basketball‘s first of back-to-back Saturday matinees with a noon start against Georgia on ESPN and then the rematch with Tennessee in CBS’s one o’clock timeslot the following Saturday. Against the ‘Dawgs, the Wildcats will need to get those legs and brains moving a little earlier than they’ve been used to with the late-night assignments seemingly every Tuesday and on consecutive Saturdays heading into tomorrow.

Jacob Toppin isn’t worried about the change in routine, though. When asked about the adjustment from waiting all day to rising early, he shrugged off any concerns and noted Kentucky wasn’t affected by its noon games earlier this season.

He said, “We had a couple of noon games, one o’clock games, in the past and that didn’t really affect us. We just got to take it like we do any other game. The time that we have, we’re going to take to prepare for the game and since it’s at noon, we have less time but we’ll figure it out and hopefully we can come out with a W.”

To Toppin’s point, Kentucky’s first noon game was against Louisville on New Year’s Eve–coincidentally, Toppin’s breakout game of the season. He snapped out of a funk with 24 points on 10-of-15 shooting and seven rebounds in the Wildcats’ 23-point win over its biggest rival.

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Two weeks later, Kentucky upset Tennessee in a noon game as a 10.5-point underdog in Knoxville, the signature win of the season.

In both of those games, the team played well early, which, as you know, hasn’t been the case in most of the other games on the schedule.

Only the trip to Tuscaloosa, where Alabama won by 26, was a daytime game not in Kentucky’s favor. We’ll call that one an anomaly until somewhere in the SEC proves Alabama can be beaten, but even then Kentucky got off to a good start against the first-place Tide. It was a two-point game with under four minutes to go in the first half.

Maybe the team prefers to have their Saturday nights off?