Bobby Knight on Calipari: How is he still coaching?

As is always the case with Knight, this is about him. It's not so much "I can't believe this crooked bastard is still coaching," but "I can't believe this crooked bastard is still coaching and I'm not."

Having said that, I agree with Knight.

 

Last time I checked, Knight's not coaching by choice.

But when a coach doesn't cheat, you can bet he gets pissed at those who do.

 

I disagree with Knight's chutzpah, but his message is right. And he's not the first to publicly state it.

When Indiana State coach Royce Waltman publicly confirmed his firing at the post-game presser after ISU lost in the MVC Tourney in 2007, he said something similar.

“I can’t get a head coaching job,” Waltman said. “You gotta understand, if you get fired for cheating, you get hired right back again. If you get fired for losing, it’s like you’ve got leprosy; so young coaches need to bear that in mind. Cheating and not graduating players will not get you in trouble, but that damn losing …”

http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/basketball/news?slug=dw-violations030207&prov=yhoo&type=lgns

 

The moral: Indiana State football needs to hire Danny Ford

 

He's not quite there yet. He's not calling him Real Need.

 

Please explain.

Knight is about as far from Calipari as two coaches can possibly get. They're both quite flawed, but in extreme opposite ways.

 

Yup. Wouldn't even think twice.

 

The "who would you let your kid play for" question is a revival of the Knight-Tark debate of the 1980s. A look at how many of their former players are in prison or otherwise perennially down on their luck should settle that question.

 

On the other hand, would you rather travel to Las Vegas to see your kid play or Bloomington, Ind.?

Sometimes you've got to be a little selfish.

 

Calipari responds by saying, in essence, "whatever."

http://sports.espn.go.com/ncb/news/story?id=4755172

 

(Full disclosure: I'm a UK "fan")

The NCAA ruling on the Memphis Final Four is a classic case of the league picking and choosing who it wants to to target. Kansas has a player who faced charges of grade alterations in high school, and where did that story go? The NCAA said it had to prove that Kansas knew or should have known about the alterations.

Meanwhile, at Memphis, the onus of proof is on the Tigers to prove they had no knowledge of Rose's SAT stuff.

Here's the issue (with both situations) that very few people addressed at the time of each allegation: the NCAA Clearinghouse approved both players. Now, as a high school athlete who dealt with the Clearinghouse, I can tell you, it's a shit organization that can't keep its own files straight. But it would appear to me that once the Clearinghouse makes its ruling, the burden is off the school to prove anything that happened before the kid got to campus unless it has explicit knowledge of wrongdoing. Maybe Memphis did. I don't know. I didn't follow the reports because understanding the NCAA is an exercise in futility (we are talking about an organization that hit Rick Majerus for buying a kid a pizza after one of his relatives died).

I'm not saying Calipari is clean. In fact, he's probably far from it. But I do wonder why certain coaches get certain reputations, while others don't get a sniff. Why does Memphis get slammed, while Duke and Kansas skate away clean after similar allegations?

 

For starters, if your best player by far in both your Final Four trips is declared to be ineligible for the whole season, that's different from buying someone a pizza.