LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Mitch Barnhart has climbed Mount Rainier. He’s summited Kilimanjaro. He’s scaled the Grand Tetons.

He knows what happens when you climb too fast without acclimating. And on Friday, at Kentucky’s football media day, the longtime athletics director sounded less like someone preparing for a football season than someone scouting the safest route through a storm at 18,000 feet.

College athletics, he suggested, has skipped base camp. He didn’t use those words. But he painted the picture of a system moving so fast that no one’s had a chance to catch their breath.

“There’s going to be a clunkiness to it,” Barnhart said of the NCAA’s new revenue-sharing era. “We’ve talked about a decade’s worth of change that has happened in the last six to ten months of college athletics. … We

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