John Calipari is honest with his players. John Calipari is straight-forward with his program and his extremely zealous fan base.
As Wisconsin Coach Bo Ryan said the day before the Final Four, Coach Cal is real.
Also real, the very strong backlash against him. It’s understandable; getting your first two Final Fours vacated (and the third may indeed be wiped off the one day too..we’ll cover that later) will certainly besmirch your reputation.
However, John Calipari haters are TOTALLY missing the big picture. Coach Cal likes to say it’s Kentucky that’s the lightning rod (What’s he supposed to say in interviews).
To some extent that’s true, but the issue is a lot deeper.
Big Blue Nation will tell you Calipari is demonized due to the “they hate us cuz they ain’t us” cliche.
Again that’s only partially true. The real cliche at work here is “don’t hate the player, hate the game.” John Calipari succeeds and proceeds within an antiquated system that’s hopelessly broken beyond repair. Popular opinion holds the NCAA revenue-producing athletic system to be anachronistic at best, neo-plantationlike at worst. So if everyone wants to put the system on trial why are they raging against the way Cal flourishes within it.
Calipari was named Adolph Rupp Coach of the Year by the Commonwealth Athletic Club of Kentucky yesterday. (How unfortunate that the award is named after a white supremacist; who coached at Kentucky, and had the same exact first name as the most reviled man in modern history…doesn’t exactly help the “sympathy for the devil” case we’re building here)
Within this past week Cal was named Associated Press and the National Association of Basketball Coaches’ National Coach of the Year. On Monday, Calipari was announced as a 2015 inductee into the Basketball Hall of Fame.
He’s never been more relevant in his life than he is at this moment. More success breeds more exposure and then more backlash.
In the words of Emperor Palpatine, “I feel your anger. Give in to your hate.”
Calipari is to college basketball today what Christian Laettner was to the sport’s Golden Age of the early ’90s- the perfect villain. If John Calipari is as guilty of breaking the rules as his most hard core detractors believe he is…why would anyone, outside of NCAA President Mark Emmert, ACTUALLY GET UPSET AT THIS? The micro-level cheating that Calipari haters believe is widespread is also irrelevant in the big picture.
No one intellectually beyond the age of 14 living in a year after 1957 actually believes in the amateurism myth of the NCAA. It’s time to, in the words of Mighty Mighty BossTones, “question the answers.”
To John Calipari attackers, turn those guns away from Lexington and point them at Indianapolis and/or New York. If you’re so upset at Calipari running a de facto NBA Developmental League franchise, then direct your vitriol at NCAA headquarters in Indy or the NBA headquarters in the Big Apple where it belongs. They make the rules, he doesn’t.
Duke right now is DOING THE SAME EXACT THING with the “one-and-done” model, and they learned it from Kentucky.
There shouldn’t even be a stigma surrounding this practice, but there is and it’s all projected onto Calipari and Kentucky, due to horrendous media spin and terrible “coverage.”
Mike Krzyzewski is teflon in the eyes of the media.
The national networks are so much in bed with Duke, that Coach K has license to behave with the ethics of Jimbo Fisher or Steve Alford; and still suffer no damage to his image.
Maybe John Calipari needs to be less honest with his players and the media, and instead espouse more “molding young men” bullshit in press conferences like Coach K does.
Perhaps Calipari doesn’t use enough corporate leadership seminar buzzwords. If he did, would he then be more liked?
All coaches, John Calipari included, utilize press conferences to propagate program platform and regurgitate coachspeak cliches. There isn’t much legitimate news at news conferences. Chris Collins, John Groce and Tom Crean are three perfect examples of this. Some coaches, like Bo Ryan and Tom Izzo, can actually “stay on message” and “make great copy” at the same time.
Calipari might be the grandmaster.
Does he do a lot of spinning when he’s at the podium? Absolutely. Is he totally full of it sometimes? Yes, indeed.
However, he’s full of it much less than the other coaches. He’s obviously not a 100% honest person. No one is; but he’s as honest as it gets in this business. Or to put it in graphical and tweet form:
In media’s eyes, Kentucky acting as a NBDL franchise is “bad for college hoops,” but Duke acting the exact same way is “doing things right”
— Paul M. Banks (@PaulMBanks) April 7, 2015
So that’s why I’m a John Calipari sympathizer/defender, or as this satirical chart from @sportspickle says: https://t.co/blQCXYfUwc
— Paul M. Banks (@PaulMBanks) April 7, 2015
Paul M. Banks owns, operates and writes The Sports Bank.net, which is partnered with Fox Sports Digital. You can read Banks’ feature stories and op-eds in the Chicago Tribune RedEye newspaper and hear his regular guest spots on numerous sports talk radio stations all across the country.
Follow him on Twitter (@paulmbanks)