According to Pat Forde of Yahoo! Sports, a lifetime contract with John Calipari might not a good thing for Kentucky.
Here is an excerpt:
Actually, the demarcation starts with the last game of year six, when a 38-0 Wildcats team was stunned in the Final Four by Wisconsin, which in turn lost the championship game to Duke. From that point forward, every season has ended with an underlying sense of underachievement.
After four Final Fours in the first six years, there are none in the last four.
In three of those four years, Kentucky was eliminated from the NCAA tournament by a lower-seeded team — No. 5 Indiana in 2016, No. 9 Kansas State last year and No. 5 Auburn this year. Both the Hoosiers and K-State were blown out in their next tournament game (we’ll see about Auburn on Saturday). With a path to the Final Four wide open for the Wildcats, they were eliminated by K-State and Auburn teams that both lost a key frontcourt contributor to injury during the postseason.
Last year Kentucky lost 11 games, a third season of double-digit defeats under Calipari. (Tubby Smith was derisively nicknamed “Ten-Loss Tubby” by Kentucky fans in the early 2000s.) Eight of those losses were in the SEC — its most league losses since the Billy Gillispie days. This year, for just the second time in the Decade of Calpari, the Wildcats won zero trophies and cut down zero nets — no SEC title, no SEC tourney title, no NCAA regional title, no national title.
So there are two views of the Decade of Calipari: the big picture that portrays excellence, and the trend picture that says things are less excellent than they used to be. Or, at the very least, things are no longer living up to hypeman Cal’s proclamations.
Among the grandiose terms he has thrown out like red meat to the fan base:
“We don’t just play college basketball, we ARE college basketball.”
“We don’t move the needle, we ARE the needle.”
“Gold standard of college athletics.”
“The Kentucky Effect.”
