I was surprised when the University of Kentucky hired John Calipari earlier this month. I was shocked when they gave him an eight year, $31.65 million contract. John Calipari is now the highest paid coach in the country which is funny because he is not even close to being the best coach.
AP Photo/Ed Reinke
Don’t get me wrong, Calipari has put up great numbers in his 17 years of coaching college ball. He has lead his teams to 10 tournament appearances, 2 final fours, and a career winning percentage better than 75%. But who were most of those games against? Certainly not against top competition. He spent the last decade coaching at Memphis in Conference USA. Bonus points to anyone reading this who can name 3 teams in Conference USA that aren’t Memphis. If you could, you must have gone to school somewhere in the conference.
The one thing that Calipari brings to the table is recruiting. He is probably the best in the country. Marcus Camby lead the great University of Massachusetts teams that Calipari had. More recently, his Memphis teams have featured legitimate NBA talent dominating most of their opposition. His recruiting classes are always near the top in the nation. It is hard to win 30 games in a season, Memphis did it the last four seasons in row. But no matter how many games those teams won, they never won a national title.
The reason: in the later rounds of the tournament, they played teams that had the same talent level. Those games really showed how bad of a coach Calipari is. He was out coached in all of them. Talent has taken him to the top of the coaching ranks, but has never taken his teams to the title. But despite his coaching deficiencies, Calipari was tremendously important to UMass and Memphis. Schools like that could never get the top talent in the country. Few people ever talked about Memphis before Calipari arrived to the campus. Nobody talks about UMass anymore. He put those schools on the map, and for that he should be praised.
Kentucky is a completely different story though. They don’t need Calipari to bring in big talent. Don’t believe me? Look at the stats for Jodie Meeks and Patrick Patterson. Top talent has always gone to Kentucky. Calipari may bring in a few extra players, but instead of beating up on the lowly Conference USA teams, he will now be facing the SEC. Talent isn’t enough, coaching makes the difference.
Under Calipari, Kentucky probably won’t miss the NCAA tournament like they did this past season. They will probably win at least 20 games a season and make deep runs in the tournament. But they won’t win a championship, and at Kentucky, that is considered a failure.
