READ: Billy Gillispie has sights on national title at Tarleton State

Ole Billy Clyde Gillispie is still coaching college basketball at the age of 62, roughly 13 years after his tenure at Kentucky came to a… disappointing end.

Now at Tarleton State, which is located in Stephenville, TX, and recently saw its men’s basketball program bump up from Divison II to Divison I, Gillispie hasn’t done much to change his coaching ways. He’s still the same intense, tough-loving, basketball-obsessed human being he was before he arrived in Lexington and even after he left.

If you would like some proof, look no further than the man himself.

Tuesday morning, ESPN’s Dave Wilson dropped a longform feature on Gillispie where the head coach said he believes he can build a national champion at Tarleton State — yes, a Divison I national champion. Along with that, the story dives deep into what Gillispie has been up to since his short stint at Kentucky, including a kidney transplant a few years ago that saved his life and his thoughts on the two years he spent as the Wildcats head coach, among other topics.

It’s well-worth the read, no matter your views on Gillispie.

What is Billy Gillispie is up to at Tarleton State? From his fall at Kentucky and Texas Tech to here, why now? Because he believes he can make the Texans a national power in a return to Division I — after a stranger gave him a kidney.https://t.co/Qy7KzWD8hN

— Dave Wilson (@dwil) February 22, 2022

Former Kentucky Football head coach Hal Mumme even makes a cameo appearance in the story. Mumme was the athletic director at Copperas Cove High School (TX) in 1987 when he hired Gillispie to coach the boy’s basketball team, his first head coaching gig.

Towards the end of the article, Gillispie talks about taking the Kentucky job, which he admits was a mistake.

“I thought at that time that you had to be at Kentucky, Indiana, UCLA, North Carolina, Duke, Kansas, one of those places,” Gillispie told ESPN. “It started changing right then to where the players were being controlled by outside people other than high school coaches or whatever. So you could do it at any school, as we have seen, and you don’t have to be at one of the power places.”

While that argument might not entirely be true, he is correct in the sense that you can win anywhere, especially so with name, image, and likeness now a recruiting factor. Winning a national title, on the other hand, is a different story, but Gillispie is the kind of person who believes he can pull it off.

Click here to give the article a read and see what else Billy Clyde had to say.