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SEC Expansion: Kentucky Would Consider Louisville Veto, Says Mitch Barnhart

Link to the SB Nation Story

Basically...UK is lobbying to keep us out.  And is saying that they "wouldn't rule out veto" to make sure it doesn't happen. Satirical comments follow.

From a press conference in the near future after the SEC has expanded to 14-teams, not including Louisville:

MB:  "After evaluation of the new 14-team SEC schedule and UK's committed desire to attend shit-tastic bowl games, the University of Kentucky will be removing the University of Louisville from it's football schedule.  We are willing to remove several millions of dollars annually out of our poor state economy to preserve our football team's strategic goal of attending the Banjo Bowl annually.  It is our hope that with the increased difficulty of our football schedule, we'll be making Banjo Bowl appearance at least once per decade, with the hope of better bowl negotiations after 2014 providing new exciting opportunities such as the Purnell Old Folks Country Sausage Bowl and the CoachCal.com Bowl."

Reporter:  "Mitch, are you aware that you could have avoided a substantial hit to the state economy by adding Louisville as the 14th member, thus not further increasing the overall difficulty of your football schedule?"

MB:  "Yes.  This was brought to my attention.  However, since Steve Kragthorpe left the University of Louisville, we believe that the difficulty of our schedule has already been increased significantly.  Couple this with the fact that bringing Louisville into the SEC would promptly remove our only advantage in recruiting and thus would allow the University of Louisville to win every major football recruiting battle against our team.  They already win most of these battles playing in the Big East.  It would only get more embarrassing if we allowed them to be on equal footing with conference affiliation."

Reporter:  "What about basketball?  Wouldn't adding Louisville aid in improving Kentucky's conference basketball schedule, usually a sore point with the national media during the month that lead up to the NCAA Tournament?"

MB:  "I'm glad you brought this up.  This has been addressed.  Riding the coattails of our football television contracts, the SEC has created a beneficial conflict of interest with the national media.  Since they must show our less-than-stellar basketball games on their national network, they are forced to pretend that LSU at Kentucky is an exciting basketball game and promote it as such.  The networks are very creative.  They use language like 'dark horse' and 'sleeper team' and 'loads of potential' to describe our opponents.  The rest of the SEC could disband basketball and the networks would still promote us."

Reporter:  "So you are satisfied with 'artificial competition' in basketball and 'impossible competition' in football?"

MB: "Absolutely.  It's like having your cake and eating it too.  The University of Kentucky has zero commitment to football, but we get a great return on our investment, probably the best in the nation.  All we care about is basketball and playing in a weak conference that gets touted as being 'respectable' is ideal for a program like ours.  Adding any real competition on the hardwood would be counter to our goals.  That's all the time for questions for now."