As we approach the end of the 2020-2021 regular college basketball season, the University of Kentucky has a record of 8-14 which is the worst record at the university for something approaching a hundred years. Not even two former famous alcoholic coaches have done this bad at UK. UK has only one hope of being invited to the NCAA Tournament this year and that is to win the South Eastern Conference Tournament which will require them to win three games in a row when they have only been able to do that twice this season despite once again having a team built around several of the top basketball recruits from the previous year's high school graduates. It ain't happening! UK will be invited to the National Invitational Tournament, also known as the Tournament Of The Also Rans. It has been interesting this year, as the wheels fell off the wagon, and stayed off, to hear the multitude of lame excuses being made for the disaster by the fan base. What is not interesting is to watch the program continue to fail due to the model being used to run the program.
As of today, March 1, 2021, since John Calipari came to Kentucky in 2009, his record is 338-91 for a winning percentage of .788 and he has won one national championship and been inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame. Simply in terms of winning percentage, that is an admirable record. But that one NCAA championship came in 2012. That was nine years ago. Joe Hall won his single NCAA Championship in 1978 and only 7 year later, at the end of the 1984-1985 season, he resigned and retired. Whether he simply got tired of the incessant pressure to win another championship or was forced to resign has never been public knowledge. But, in either case, after only 7 years of not winning the second championship Joe Hall was relegated to the status of a revered elder statesman in Lexington which his record of 297-100, for a winning percentage of .748 and nearly as good as John Calipari's, deserved. Joe Hall did his .748 the hard way with primarily four year players who had some degree of loyalty to the program. Orlando "Tubby" Smith had a record of .760 at Kentucky and won one national championship the hard way with primarily four year players who had some degree of loyalty to the program. Nine years later, Tubby had not won a second championship and he too was gone.
In early April of 2012, all the fans of the university were elated, literally jumping up and down, firmly convinced that in only a few years the University of Kentucky would win enough NCAA Championships to finally equal and pass UCLA under John Wooden, one of the greatest coaches who ever lived. When I think about this absolute hero worship of John Calipari and the system he has instilled into University of Kentucky basketball, I am reminded of the words of Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon:
And the people bowed and prayed
To the neon god they made
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
Before I go on, let me say clearly that I am a fan of John Calipari and his ability to coach basketball. I am not a fan of his system which is simply to run an NBA training camp, to recruit as many players as possible who are cinches for the NBA, put as many of those players as possible into the NBA, tout that form of success as being success for the program, and to ignore the fact that the university with the most wins in NCAA basketball history is not the team with the most championships and will not be playing for one this year. As soon as John Calipari got to the University of Kentucky, he instituted a plan based on one and done players who were locks for the NBA and ignored, for the most part, a long standing tradition at Kentucky of recruiting in state players, four year players, and players with ties to the state and the university. That is to say he stopped recruiting players with loyalty to the program. We often see figures about how much money the NBA has paid and is paying to those former one and done University of Kentucky basketball players. But have you ever seen an article in the media about how even one of those players ever made a sizeable donation to the university which gave them an opportunity to play one year, ignore tradition, and move on to the NBA and the bank, actually numerous banks? According to this article by sportswriter Dennis Varney from December 21, 2020, there are more than thirty former University of Kentucky players in the NBA. One day later, December 22, 2020, Duke University had what was an Atlantic Coast Conference record 26 players in the NBA and has actually won two NCAA championships since John Calipari has been at Kentucky. Villanova, which has won two championships since Calipari has been at Kentucky, had only 8 players in the NBA at the start of the 2020 season. The bottom line of that is that NCAA national championships are not won by teams of one and done freshmen. They are won by teams of committed, loyal players who intend to stay four years, develop skills, accept coaching, and play as a team.
Most one and one players come to any university believing they are God's gift not just to basketball but to the world in general. Most of them have been given miles and miles of leeway by high school and AAU coaches because they were stars. Most of them believe that they, and only they, can lead a team to success. They also tend to believe that the university which they have graced with their presence is lucky to have them, better let them have their way, and stay out of their way while they serve out a mandatory year before leaving. Many of them view that year in much the same way they would view a jail sentence. They do not play team ball. They are not interested in winning unless they are the player of the game, the season, the decade, and all of history, as briefly as they view history. They do not care about assists, blocks, or rebounds unless a person they believe is less talented than them is providing them the ball via those assists, blocks, and rebounds so they can score and look good in the press.
University of Kentucky basketball is paying a horrible price for having an NBA training camp on campus instead of a team of loyal four year players who are committed to winning a national championship, achieving a degree, and then moving on the NBA if fate decides they should. But, I am not saying Kentucky needs to fire John Calipari mainly for these reasons: 1) he can coach basketball as well as anyone Kentucky could likely replace him with; 2) he has an incredibly high buy out built into his contract; and, 3) just as the program can be fixed, so can Calipari and his thinking. He is a person who has a great sense of self preservation in addition to his sense of self promotion. What I am suggesting is that Athletic Director Mitch Barnhart have a thirty to sixty minute "Come To Jesus Meeting" with Calipari and inform him of the new, and old, focus of University of Kentucky basketball, winning national championship and that focus can be achieved by doing the following things: 1) the heart of the team every year must be five players who are committed to play four years and earn a degree; 2) those players must not be living under they idea they are one and done; 3) those players must be rated from about 25 to 100 in their high school graduating class; 4) the coaching staff may then have as many as five players each year on the team who are rated above 25 in their high school graduating class so long as they know that the experienced players will start and play most of the time especially early in the year and that playing time for anyone else will be on a strictly earned basis; 5) other slots on the team should be filled with other players with strong ties to the university and the state who are willing to do the dirty work of getting beat up in practice, fighting for playing time, and taking orders from the coaches; and, 6) every year the coaching staff must actively recruit whomever is selected as Mister Basketball in Kentucky.
You are wondering why I brought up that last insistence about Mr. Basketball in Kentucky, I bet. If you look at this year's roster for Western Kentucky University, they have five players on the roster who were either Mr. Basketball in Kentucky or a finalist for that award and John Calipari never recruited any of them. At Western Kentucky this year, Taveion Hollingsworth, Dayvion McKnight, and Carson Williams were all previous Kentucky Mr. Basketball winners. Jackson Harlan was a finalist for Kentucky Mr. Basketball. Isaiah Cozart was named Gatorade Kentucky Boys Basketball Player of the Year and a finalist for Kentucky Mr. Basketball. All five of those players would have literally killed and died to play in Rupp Arena for four years for the University of Kentucky and were not offered that opportunity. And this year, they defeated the University of Alabama on December 15, 2020, and probably all watched on television as the University of Kentucky lost to Alabama twice. Right now, the most likely candidate to become Kentucky Mr. Basketball 2021 is Reed Shepherd, the son of former Kentucky player Jeff Shepherd, and there are persistent rumors in the media that Calipari has not actively recruited him. It is long past time for Mitch Barnhart to have that "Come To Jesus Meeting" with John Calipari and put a stop the pitfalls of allowing Kentucky basketball to be nothing more or less than an NBA training camp.
I do not fully know how seriously Kentucky basketball was damaged by losing assistant coach Kenny Payne but I firmly believe his move to the NBA was a part of the problem this year. But that does not lessen the importance of stopping the NBA training camp focus of the program as it has been for the last decade.
