Excerpts from Mark Story in the Lexington Herald Leader...
Well that didn't take long, did it Dr. Todd?
Exactly 56 days after you introduced John Calipari as Kentucky coach on April Fool's Day, it became public that the NCAA is charging Cal's former school, Memphis, with major violations including academic fraud.
Now you, Dr. Todd, as president of one of the most penalized schools in NCAA history, have hired a coach who may soon have Final Four trips from two different schools "vacated" due to rules infractions on his watch.
That would be a proud entry on the legacy of a university president, wouldn't it?
Of course, Calipari was not "named" when his signature player at Massachusetts, Marcus Camby, was found to be on the payroll of an agent during his college playing days under Cal.
Unless one is "Kelvin Sampson dumb," in big-time college sports the head coaches are never "named." They're better at maintaining plausible deniability than the CIA.
If not being personally "named" absolved a head coach of the responsibility for major rule-breaking within their programs, Eddie Sutton would still be the basketball coach at Kentucky and Hal Mumme would still walk the sidelines at Commonwealth Stadium.
Everyone who follows college basketball closely has long known who John Calipari is. He's spent his career with his programs driving 95 mph through the gray areas.
Alleged scandals like the one in Memphis tend to produce a "drip, drip, drip" of new accusations. You think there aren't some Memphis backers, feeling jilted by Calipari's departure, who may not have their tongues loosened?
Furthermore, Dr. Todd, you better hope that Calipari's recruitment of mega-prospects John Wall and DeMarcus Cousins — which began on Memphis' recruiting budget and ended with signatures on Kentucky letters of intent — was on the up-and-up.
Excerpts from Leoweekly.com's C. D. Kaplan
Coach Cal may indeed be Conman Cal. At best, UK fans hope he morphs into Harold Hill, you know The Music Man. At worst, the most penalized program in the history of college hoops may be in for some more dark days. I swear it looks like that’s an Emery freight envelope under that new throne just installed at Rupp.
Note that I’ve patiently waited until Paragraph #6 to pull out my now hackneyed, way too oft used quote on how Coach Cal got all those superduperpreps to come eat dry ribs at the Rendezvous, and play in a crappy conference for a school never on the tube: “No salary cap.” I’m tellin’ ya, it cracks me up every time.
So then, my advice to those Big Blue fans who are going to learn probably sooner than later what the blues really are: Enjoy next season. It may be the last happy one for awhile. If you think all those top ten prepsters decided at the last minute to come to Lexington because they suddenly loved the strains of “On On U of K,” well, check the cabbage falling out of their back pockets.
Because history tells us — not just a sardonic, bemused cynic like me — history tells us: UK, with John Calipari at the helm, has a better chance of landing in the NCAA hoosegow with Ws taken off its ledger than it does of an era of The Baron Redux. And it also tells us that Mitch Barnhart and Lee Todd got some ’splainin’ to do.
Excerpts from Billy Reed
The thread that ties together the Billy Clyde Gillispie and John Calipari messes in University of Kentucky basketball are the incompetence and duplicity of President Lee Todd and Athletics Director Mitch Barnhart. The university’s Board of Trustees should call an emergency meeting to grill Todd and Barnhart. If they’re not satisfied with the answers, change may be in order.
They hired Gillispie without thoroughbly checking him out and let him get away with not signing a formal contract. They did sign a letter of understanding that gave Gillispie the safeguards he needed — $1.5 million a year if he were fired without cause — but didn’t give UK the safeguards it needed in case Gillispie proved to be the wrong guy, which, of course, he did.
So now the letter of understanding is the crux of the $6 million lawsuit that Gillispie filed against the UK Athletics Association in Dallas. He and his attorneys say it is a binding legal contract, and it may be hard to prove them wrong. UK’s only out seems to be a clause that says the terms of the letter are contingent upon Gillispie signing a formal agreement.
In the Calipari case, Todd and Barnhart knew that the NCAA had informed Memphis on Jan. 16 that it was investigating Calipari’s program for rules violations that apparently involved point guard Derrick Rose, who led Memphis to the NCAA title game as a freshman in 2007-’08.
Rose was not mentioned by name, but the NCAA said its allegations involved a player who participated only in that one season, and Rose is the only player who fits that bill. The connection between Rose and Memphis was “Worldwide Wes,” a notorious and nefarious flesh peddler who ingratiates himself with many of the nation’s best prospects.
It seems the NCAA has reason to believe that somebody took the SAT entrance exam for Rose. If so, that’s academic fraud, one of the most serious violations in the NCAA rules book. It also seems the NCAA thinks that Memphis covered the $2,000 tab for one of Rose’s associates to fly on the team plane to a road game.
Instead of being forthcoming about the NCAA’s investigation of Calipari’s program at Memphis, Todd and Barnhart decided not to mention it in the hope that the NCAA wouldn’t find any wrongdoing. So at the press conference announcing the hiring of Calipari, they smiled and talked about how thoroughly they had checked him out and, in effect, lied by omission.
Had they told the whole truth, of course, they would have been pilloried by the media and the responsible element of the UK fan base. Given UK’s lengthy history of trouble with the NCAA, it would have been easy to make a case that history was repeating itself – that the Big Blue again was putting winning ahead of all.
By not being upfront about what was happening at Memphis, Todd and Barnhart did both the media and the public a grave disservice. Those who were willing to give Calipari the benefit of the doubt – and I’m one of them – now feel used and abused. By not putting all the facts on the table, they willfully deceived us. They gambled that the Memphis mess would blow over without charges being made – and they lost, spectacularly.