Everybody’s Super Bowl or Calipari bluster? Either way, UK’s season is about to get rowdy.

Bruiser Flint and John Calipari go back a long way.

The current assistant at Kentucky first worked under Calipari — now in his 15th season as the Wildcats’ head coach — back in 1989, when the 24-year-old Flint arrived at UMass as a new addition to the staff of the 29-year-old Calipari, who was entering his second season in charge of the Minutemen.

Flint spent seven years on Calipari’s staff there, he’s now in his fourth season with Calipari at Kentucky, and the two coaches remained close friends in the two and a half decades in between.

This is to say that Flint knows Calipari about as well as anyone else in college basketball. And that means he’s heard plenty of that Calipari bluster over the years.

Recently, Flint recalled a phrase he’d commonly hear from his old boss and longtime friend before he came to work for him at Kentucky. Calipari was often telling him the same thing about what it meant to be a part of UK basketball.

“We’re always everybody’s Super Bowl,” Flint repeated, his tone that of an audible eye roll.

Calipari has used the phrase ad nauseam to suggest that whenever Kentucky comes to town — no matter the opponent or the circumstances — the local crowd shows up to root against the Cats.

UK fans have heard it for years. So have the Wildcats’ rivals. And so, too, it seems, have Calipari’s friends and colleagues across college basketball. Flint smirked as he talked.

“And I’d be like, ‘Whatever.’ You know what I mean? ‘Stop, man. Here you go with your stuff. I’m not trying to hear that.’ Until you come to work here,” Flint continued in a more serious tone. “You are everybody’s Super Bowl.”

Flint, who succeeded Calipari as UMass head coach before leading the Drexel program for 15 seasons and serving as an assistant at Indiana for three years after that, came to work at Kentucky during the 2020-21 season, when attendance was limited by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Since then, he’s seen what Calipari was talking about. And he, begrudgingly, accepted that, this time, the Kentucky coach wasn’t full of it.

“I’ll watch some film when we’ll go play a team in the league,” Flint said. “And you watch — they have their stands and there’s nobody there. And you go there, and everybody’s there. You get prepared for the game and you see, ‘Man, ain’t nobody at that game.’ They’re playing against another team in the conference. Then when you go there, it’s a whiteout, a blackout, an orangeout — whatever ‘out’ it is, it is when we go to play them.

“That’s the thing that I really got. And I had to give him credit and say, ‘You know what, you’re right. We might be everybody’s Super Bowl.’”

Staring with Saturday in Gainesville — the opener of Kentucky’s nine-date road show for this 2023-24 season — and ending March 9 in Knoxville, these young Wildcats will see and hear plenty on their journey through SEC country.

The UK-Florida game Saturday was announced as a sellout last month, complete with plans of an orangeout — free orange shirts distributed to every fan in attendance and the Gators debuting their new orange jerseys with a script font across the chest.

Stop No. 2 next weekend: College Station, Texas, another early sellout and another T-shirt night, with “Reed Rowdies” gear available to all Texas A&M students in the 12,989-seat Reed Arena.

More promotions will surely be announced as the season continues. Mississippi State has already planned a student bucket hat giveaway for its home date with UK on Feb. 27. A couple of weeks before that, Auburn will pass out T-shirts for its home game against the Wildcats.

Auburn coach Bruce Pearl, a longtime admirer of UK’s program who has often doubled as a Calipari agitator, poked fun at Kentucky’s coach once again last month when announcing the program’s annual T-shirts to raise money to benefit cancer patients would be part of the Kentucky game-day promotion.

“I just love doing it for Kentucky, because if you don’t do it for Kentucky, then John Calipari gets his feelings hurt,” Pearl said. “Because if it’s not a whiteout or a blueout or a blackout — and you do it for somebody else — it just pisses him off.”

Pearl, one of the few in the sport that can match Calipari’s showmanship, has created one of college basketball’s best home environments during his tenure at Auburn, and that’ll be among the many pressure cookers that the Cats will have to walk into over the next couple of months.

Like so many of Calipari’s previous UK teams, this group has little collective experience in such situations.

‘It’s gonna be loud’

Kentucky entered SEC play with the nation’s No. 6 ranking and a roster filled with talent, but most of those players are young, and hardly any of them have represented the Wildcats on the road.

In fact, Antonio Reeves is the only UK player with ample experience in that area. Adou Thiero was a role player as a freshman last season, but he played double-digit minutes in just five of Kentucky’s nine SEC road games and logged more than 20 minutes only once. Ugonna Onyenso played a total of 12 minutes on the road in the SEC last season, 11 of those coming in a blowout loss at Alabama.

Every other scholarship player on the Wildcats’ roster is new to the program.

Fifth-year forward Tre Mitchell has major-conference experience, but walking into Big 12 arenas as a Texas or West Virginia player doesn’t elicit the same kind of ire as playing for UK in an SEC city. Beyond that, all of the Wildcats are freshmen, a similar roster structure as many of Calipari’s previous teams, most of which struggled in road games (when the SEC wasn’t nearly as strong as it is now, it’s important to note).

UK has gone 15-12 in SEC road games over the past three seasons, which included that 2020-21 bunch that went 9-16 overall amid COVID-19 precautions. The 2017-18 squad led by freshmen Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Kevin Knox was 3-6 on the road and 7-2 at home. The Tyler Ulis and Jamal Murray edition of the Cats in 2015-16 went 4-5 on the road and 9-0 in Rupp Arena. The Julius Randle-led UK team two years earlier was 5-4 on the road and 8-1 at home. And the Final Four team of 2010-11 had all sorts of problems away from home, going 2-6 in SEC road games with a perfect 8-0 mark at Rupp Arena.

The latest ESPN Bracketology projections have eight SEC teams besides UK making the 2024 NCAA Tournament, and the Wildcats will face six of those league rivals on the road over the next two months (plus a trip to the always electric Bud Walton Arena in Arkansas).

“I’ve definitely talked to them about it,” Reeves said of life on the SEC road. “Just making sure they understand what’s really going on. There’s a lot of great teams out there that really scout — a couple of Top 25 teams that we’re going to have to go against — so I’m definitely emphasizing, and they’re starting to get it.”

Technically, this UK team played one nonconference road game. Reeves laughed out loud along with the notion that the game in question — a 95-76 victory at Louisville on Dec. 21, when there was about as much blue as red in the Yum Center stands — was not truly a road game.

While UK fans tend to find their way into any building, Reeves knows full well that — with the possible exception of Vanderbilt on Feb. 6 — the Cats won’t see anything close to a split crowd in their nine upcoming road trips. He found that out firsthand last season, his first run as a Wildcat after three years with mid-major Illinois State, where he didn’t experience anything close to the raucous atmospheres of SEC basketball.

“Loud crowd,” Reeves said on what to expect. “Them guys are gonna be at the game before we even go out there and work out. It’s gonna be loud. A lot of signs, a lot of cheering. You really can’t even hear nothing, when you’re playing against Florida, or anybody (in the league). You just gotta jell in as a team, and talk to one another while you’re on the floor.”

The 23-year-old said it took him a while to adjust to those kinds of environments. He specifically mentioned the Arkansas game — a two-hour powder keg that saw Reeves drop 37 points while leading UK to an upset victory — as a standout memory.

“How lit it was in there,” he said. “Guys had their shirts off and had writing on them. ‘You suck!’ You this, you that. That’s why I tell these guys all the time — we’re gonna have to face that stuff. They’re definitely going to be ready for it, though.”

They sound ready, even if they don’t know what they’re getting into just yet.

Freshman guard D.J. Wagner, often playing the villain on the road as a stud recruit for nationally renowned Camden High in New Jersey, smiled at the thought of thousands of people yelling at him.

“Them type of games — they’re the best games to play in,” he said. “They’re fun. That’s what you play basketball for.”

Fellow freshman Rob Dillingham said he tries to block out the crowd, good or bad.

“I just play basketball,” he said. “I don’t look at the crowd, I don’t look at nothin’ — I just focus on the game.”

Dillingham paused here, rethinking that a bit.

“If it’s a good environment, I kind of like when it’s more lit, and more talking trash,” he continued with a grin. “I like that. So it’ll definitely boost us, if anything.”

Flint also sees it as a positive, especially for a young bunch with national title aspirations. The NCAA Tournament will be played on neutral courts, obviously, but making a run requires overcoming adversity. And this relatively inexperienced group should see plenty of that before March.

“I’ll be honest with you, you love to play in those environments,” Flint said. “... I was a mid-major coach. We’d play some teams, there was like five hundred people in there. You know what I mean? They’d hear me hollerin’ and screamin’ at everybody. You want to go somewhere where you don’t hear that. And I think that’s one of the things that you appreciate about that. You’re going into a good environment, and it gets you up to play. Gets the coaches up, too.

“So you like that as a player — that you’re going to go into some places and you’re going to have a great environment to play in.”

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