Relax. . .Coach Cal is driving this thing

The above picture is of "Spaghetti Junction" in Atlanta. It's hard to really tell what direction anyone is going from this bird's eye view. From a distance, it seems like a mess, yet the people traveling the busy roads know exactly where they're going and what road they need to take to get there.

The current state of Kentucky Basketball is alot like this right now, organized chaos. From our point of view, there seems to be a lot of uncertainty with the immediate future of our team. Rumors abound that Cal may lose up to 9 scholarship players from this year's Elite 8 team. Tonight we had a report that Orton was dropping his classes and would begin his training for the draft, only for Daniel to later rebut this claim by saying he had made no decision yet.

Then came the rumor that Dodson would declare for the draft and is likely not to return to Lexington next season. I find this one even harder to believe considering that Dodson has not been projected by any reputable draft services to be selected in either round this summer. Still, there does seem to be some smoke that he may indeed leave, but it's pretty hard to see him landing in the NBA.

Tired of all these wild rumors yet? Well there was another message board rumor earlier yesterday that said Kentucky would get at least two commitments tonight at the McDonald's All Star Game. Of course the game ended hours ago and there have been no commitments to speak of. This was probably a "he said/she said" moment, and I didn't give it much creditability to begin with, so I am certainly not surprised it didn't happen. With all of the negative mojo out there right now, a big time commitment probably would have went a long way to settle the restless natives of Big Blue Island, but for now, we wait.

There are other rumors out there, and it's already been a very interesting post-season, and it hasn't even been a week since our season ended. At this point, my advice to Big Blue Nation is simple: take a deep breath and relax. If Billy Gillispie or even Tubby Smith were still at the helm, I might be concerned; but they aren't, Coach Cal is.

We shouldn't forget where we were just a year ago. Coach Cal arrived to Lexington in April, inherited a mediocre NIT team and immediately lost his leading scorer to the draft. All he did in return was recruit one of the best classes in the history of college basketball. Now he has a much improved UK brand and a lot of playing time to pitch to those remaining names in next year's class. If Kentucky were to actually lose all their players but four or five, does anyone seriously doubt that Coach Cal can't turn around and quickly reload, just like he did last year?

There's other reasons to remain optimistic. The #1 recruit, Brandon Knight, is still considered a solid Kentucky lean at this point and several others (like Leslie and Jones) are still very high on the Cats. No matter what, I have faith that Cal will finish out this class much like he did last year and the roster will be oozing with NBA talent.

So while it's hard to figure out what the heck is going on in the middle of all of this, only the person actually driving the roadways need to knows where he is going, and Coach Cal certainly does.

And he doesn't need a map to get there.