Kentucky’s Swag Is Phenomenal

The word of the week in Lexington is “swagger.” On Tuesday, coach John Calipari discussed bringing a certain swag back to Kentucky basketball:

↵↵“This Kentucky program always had a swagger,” Calipari said. “People saw it. The players knew it. It had a swagger about itself. The other team knew it, the officials knew it, everybody knew it. You walked in and there it was. We’ve just got to get that swagger back.”

↵↵Yesterday, in response to this quote, SB Nation’s Sea of Blue wrote about the importance of Kentucky swagger at length. In fact, they used the word “swagger” 25 times, setting some sort of swag world record:

↵↵When Coach Calipari talks about “swagger,” he is not talking about smack-talk, or braggadocio, naked hubris or narcissism. Those are all bad things, by my lights, and have no real place in college basketball or mature sports discussion except as a rare, momentary, guilty indulgence.

↵The swagger that Coach Cal and most of our fans want to see back is the confidence of a program that knows where it wants to go, knows it it is headed in the right direction, and knows that it will get there sooner rather than later. It is an embrace of past glory, learning from past failure, and a determination to apply both in the present.

↵↵So, essentially, Coach Cal has somehow totally altered the very definition of the word “swagger,” both in a literal and slang sense. At least, if that second graph above is to be believed.

↵*Headline reference for those new to the internet.