Fox Sports writer Reid Forgrave posted a good article about John Calipari coaching one and done players.
Here is an excerpt.
No coach in college basketball is as polarizing as Kentucky’s John Calipari.
In Lexington he’s nearly a deity. He restored Kentucky basketball to the top of the college game after half a decade in the wilderness.
But outside of Lexington? He’s any number of slurs, many of which might be unfair: He’s a job-hopping mercenary (despite the fact he spent eight years at UMass and nine years at Memphis), he’s a cheater (a 2012 CBSSports.com poll of nearly 100 college coaches pegged Calipari as the coach perceived to be the biggest cheater in the sport), he’s more politician than coach (“We don’t just play college basketball,” Calipari said with presidential bravado before October’s Big Blue Madness. “We ARE college basketball.”).
Fair? Not fair? I don’t know. I do know that when a major American sports figure is at the top of the mountain – and there’s no bigger mountaintop in college basketball than Kentucky – we love to knock him off. So I take most of these bad raps with huge grains of salt.
But as Coach Cal leads his 9-3, 18th-ranked Wildcats onto the court for Saturday’s matchup against cross-state rival and defending national champion Louisville — the biggest non-conference rivalry matchup of the season — I got to thinking about the one bad rap about Cal that seems to cause the most consternation inside of Kentucky basketball.
Has Kentucky basketball, with this year’s freshman-dominated team and Cal’s full embrace of the one-and-done era, become an NBA factory that cynically chews up the nation’s best young talents and spits them out less than a year later?
Is Cal a coach who actually forms lasting relationships with his players, or just a recruiter who offers his players a one-year NBA tryout on the biggest possible stage then whisks them out the door and moves on to the next class?
It’s an especially worthy question this season, as Calipari has fielded one of the sport’s historically great recruiting classes with six McDonald’s All-Americans and possible No. 1 overall NBA Draft pick Julius Randle.
Read Forgrave: John Calipari is more than the coach of a ‘one-and-done’ NBA factory by clicking here.
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