John Calipari loves to call them “crazy.” National pundits like to say they’re obsessed. The actual fans, they pride themselves on being the most passionate fan base in all of sports.

Fans at just about every elite school will tell you that they have the best fan base in the country. From North Carolina to Ohio State, Syracuse and so forth, just about all of them have a powerful core of fans that sells out arenas, rocks postseason tournaments and rallies around their players as if they’re family.

And yet, how many of those schools sell out exhibition games in the middle of summer? How many of them turn rival cities into Big Blue beacons when they come to town? What other fan base can raise $1.2 million for earthquake victims at the encouragement of a head coach?

As so many people have come to know and learn in college sports, it only happens at Kentucky.

“I think it’s the most passionate college basketball fan base in America and probably one of the two or three most passionate fan bases period,” said Matt Jones, founder of the wildly popular website KentuckySportsRadio.com. “The fan base lives and breathes basketball and it’s actually a part of their lives. It’s a culture of basketball.”

Calling Kentucky’s fan base the most passionate fan base in the country isn’t anything new. UK fans have long been viewed as some of most loyal in all of sports. But how does one truly measure the power of the Big Blue Nation? Is there a way of quantifying it?

Jones may be the perfect example. Before fall of 2005, Jones was a practicing lawyer without a journalism career, no reporting aspirations or any dreams of making it onto television. He was simply a lawyer looking to stay in touch with a handful of his buddies that were now spread across the states.

As a means to communicate with his friends and talk sports, Jones decided to create a blog called “Kentucky Sports Radio.” Jones would be the first to admit that there wasn’t much, at least aesthetically, to the website. It was and still is your basic blog that is light on editing, heavy on opinions and without much of a design.

Matt Jones, founder of kentuckysportsradio.com, said that when UK fans get behind something, they're all in. The "Jorts" nickname with Josh Harrellson is a prime example, he says.

But for what the site lacks in its look, it makes up for it with a common, unbeatable thread: When Jones and his friends set out to do their blog, they did so with the idea of encapsulating what it meant to be a Kentucky fan in the “most ridiculous manner possible.”

Playing to the Big Blue fan base, it turned out to be genius.

With the help of some exclusive content, a passionate dedication and proper networking – Jones has long credited former Wildcat Patrick Patterson for helping launch the site – Kentucky Sports Radio became popular basically overnight. In just a few short years, Kentucky Sports Radio became a daily stop for UK fans, and today the website has almost a cult-like following.

Jones says the website enjoys roughly 145,000 site visits a day during the offseason and about 175,000 hits a day during the season. That, according to Jones, makes it the largest independent college sports blog in the country.

However you choose to view Jones and the material his website produces, there’s no arguing that Kentucky Sports Radio and its crew are amazingly successful. Jones has quit practicing law to focus on the job full time, and the success of the website has led to a daily TV show on cn|2 and a daily radio spot, both in Louisville.

Outside of maybe Alabama football, Jones isn’t sure if the site would have been even half as successful in a different avenue.

“If you don’t have Kentucky’s fan base, there’s no way the site works,” Jones said. “Could it have been successful? Sure. But could it have been something that would have led us to having three full-time positions and having me quit the law practice and all that? No way. It had to be UK.”

Jones believes it’s just another case of the Big Blue Nation’s power. When Kentucky fans get behind something, Jones says they’re all in.

“I think it can best be seen with the phenomenon about (Josh) Harrellson last year and the whole Jorts thing,” Jones said. “He essentially got a nickname that became his name by the end of the year. That essentially started out as a picture on our website on the Internet. It was a picture of him on a visit wearing jean shorts. That became his name. That’s all UK fans pushing it. It wasn’t some announcer saying it during the game. It was just fans calling him that from the Internet. When fans can spontaneously give players names that sticks with them in the NBA, that says something.”

Jones certainly isn’t the only unit in measuring the Big Blue Nation’s power. A telethon in January 2010 actually made dollars and sense out of the unifying strength of Wildcat fans.

Quickly following the deadliest earthquake in Haiti’s history, Calipari contacted WKYT General Manager Wayne Martin on a Thursday afternoon about organizing a Sunday telethon called “Hoops for Haiti.”

“He said he felt compelled that we needed to do something to try to utilize the networking we had and help those in need,” Martin said.

WKYT was all in. Within days, Calipari and WKYT secured countless pledges and donations while Calipari prepared his team for a conference road game at Auburn and Martin prepared a live telethon for Sunday afternoon.

Going into that Sunday, Martin had a pretty good feeling about Calipari and the Big Blue Nation, but when Calipari asked Martin what he thought they could raise for the victims in Haiti, he told Calipari not to get his hopes up and informed him that a typical telethon gets $20,000 to $30,000.

Martin expected more with this kind of telethon but never did he imagine they’d generate more than $1.2 million in relief efforts. There were a number of factors in the inspiring telethon, including Calipari’s coaching fraternity, the United Way and the Red Cross, but Martin said you can never underestimate the fusion of Kentucky fans.

“There has always been a big UK following, especially in basketball,” Martin said. “What has happened now with Cal is he’s expanded it exponentially. He embraces it. He makes himself accessible to the Big Blue Nation. He’s an amazing ambassador for the University of Kentucky.”

Calipari has essentially taken the blazing passion inside UK fans and dumped fire on it. That much was evident two weeks ago when Rupp Arena hosted an exhibition basketball game in the middle of August to a crowd of 23,000-plus fans.

Charged with getting his Dominican Republic National Team ready for international play, Calipari was in search of a pair of exhibition games to test the Dominicans before traveling to South America. Calipari considered bringing in another national team until a light bulb clicked in his head: Why not take advantage of a strong alumni base?

Over the next several days, professionals and former Kentucky players like John Wall, Tayshaun Prince, DeMarcus Cousins and Rajon Rondo made it known that they were willing to return to the Commonwealth for the games. Eight NBA pros agreed.

When it was decided to play the game in Rupp Arena, Carl Hall, the director of arena management at Rupp Arena, was quickly brought into the process in mid-July by ProConsulting. He negotiated a rental agreement with ProConsulting in a short period of time and the date of the Rupp Arena exhibition game was set for Aug. 15.

Behind the strength of the Big Blue Nation, head coach John Calipari and WKYT raised more than $1.2 million in the "Hoops for Haiti" telethon in January 2010.

In charge of Rupp Arena’s events for 23 years, two-thirds of the life of the arena, Hall has seen his fair share of Kentucky games and Big Blue passion. But even he was only expecting to sell about 10,000 to 12,000 tickets for an exhibition game that was promoted solely off a couple of tweets from Calipari and few reports from Kentucky Sports Radio.

However, because of the power of Kentucky fans, Rupp Arena made 15,000 tickets available for the presale. The presale is usually significantly smaller, but Rupp officials were forced to put up nearly 65 percent of its ticket allotment for the presale when Calipari tweeted out the password to his 1.1 million Twitter followers.

In the first 15 to 20 minutes of the presale, 80 percent of the tickets were gone.

“I would have never thought, even a few days before it went on sale, that we would have sold the number of tickets the way we did,” Hall said. “We anticipated a big surge in tickets, a big buying frenzy, but never to the level it occurred.”

When the remaining general admission tickets went on sale the following Monday, it took about 20 minutes to sell out the event.

“You couldn’t convince me that you could do that anywhere else in the country,” Jones said. “There is nowhere else that you could do that. I saw Kansas is going to do a game like that in September. I can guarantee you they don’t sell those kind of ticket numbers.”

On the day of the game, Rupp Arena had the look and feel of a critical regular-season matchup (highlights of the game). Vocal chords screamed in midseason form and the stands vibrated like a rivalry showdown. Rondo described the atmosphere as “breathtaking.” The following night, a little less than 20,000 fans packed the KFC Yum! Center in Louisville, home of UK’s archrival, for the second game.

Jones, who has as good of a pulse on Kentucky athletics as anyone, said one of the best ways of gauging the strength of the fan base is to analyze how the modern media covers UK.  He argues that reporters are more inclined to write about Kentucky because they know their stories will get the online visits.

“When it’s on UK, everybody reads it,” Jones said. “I do think one of the reasons writers write so many stories about Kentucky, both positively and negatively, is because they know Kentucky fans will read them.”

Jones worked at CBS Sports for six months and said that stories that included Kentucky or Duke received 50 times the attention of any other college basketball story. That means if you’re a national columnist or reporter looking to get hits, chances are you’re keeping a closer eye on the Wildcats than just about every school in the nation.

The increased coverage, especially on the Internet, creates more exposure for Kentucky, but it also generates more scrutiny and criticism.

“That puts you in a catch 22 if you’re a UK fan,” Jones said. “You read something you think is garbage, do you comment on it, give it more attention or try to ignore it because they’re out trying to get attention? It’s a double-edged sword.”

Deciphering what is worth reading, what’s true and what isn’t can be tough for a Kentucky fan because of the bulk of content, but Jones believes that the country’s most Internet-savvy fan base forces the media to double check their facts or run the risk of being called out.

“The UK fan base, when it gets into action, it can be a pretty powerful force,” Jones said.