For the second time in Calipari’s college coaching career, the NCAA has wiped a Final Four season from the record books for rules violations under his watch.
Massachusetts suffered the indignity in 1996, and Memphis gets the black eye this time around. The Tigers have to vacate all 38 wins from their 2007-08 season, and the university must repay the money it made getting to the national championship game that season.
Calipari was not implicated in either case, and he was long gone from both campuses by time the penalties were handed down. He left UMass to run the New Jersey Nets following the ’96 campaign, and this past April, he left Memphis for Kentucky. There’s no way to prove Calipari knew of any wrongdoing, but these kind of scandals don’t help debunk the perception that he’s slicker than an oil spill and will cut a corner faster than his teams break a zone press.
One mess can be explained. Two begin to look like a trend.
College athletics are big business, and they’ve been big business for a while. The sad truth is that winning with integrity has been replaced by winning at any cost.
John Wooden won 10 national championships without so much as uttering a cuss word. He was as concerned with preparing his players for life as teaching them how to properly put on socks to prevent getting blisters.
He was more than a coach. He was a role model, a mentor, someone to look up to and aspire to be. He showed players how to do the right thing.
That’s a coach’s job.
Calipari has let his players down. His selfishness or ignorance – or combination of the two — has tarnished the college career of everyone who played under him, including those from UMass.
The head coach is responsible for everything that happens in the program. It is up to him to educate his players about the pitfalls, not have them get caught up in traps. Claiming to be deaf or blind is not an excuse.
Calipari left UMass and Memphis right before things got ugly. That’s how it goes sometimes — the people who deserve to be held accountable end up getting multimillion-dollar contracts.
And the players who work so hard to achieve national prominence get the short end of the stick. The NCAA might be able to erase the accomplishments of some Calipari teams, but that doesn’t diminish what the players who were playing the right way — which most of them were – accomplished.
Two Calipari-coached Final Four teams have lost their credibility, yet he still has one of the best jobs in college basketball.
That's a flagrant foul.
