Now that Rick Pitino’s out of commission, America’s filthiest, cheatingest, richest, college coach, John Calipari, struggles with the lamestream media:
Q. What is your reaction to the whole FBI investigation of college basketball? …
JOHN CALIPARI: Well, what’s out there right now is a black eye. But here is the thing for everybody here: I don’t want to come across as uneducated or dumb. None of us know where this thing’s going. So for me to really comment much on it, I mean, I don’t know where all this is going.
Obviously, what’s happened to this point isn’t good. At this point I don’t think me commenting without knowing all the facts is the right thing to do.
Q. How do you react to Mark Emmert’s statements yesterday? Do you think the culture of college basketball is so hopelessly corrupt that something has to change?
JOHN CALIPARI: I read the statement. I kind of liked it because at a point in there he mentioned about the students. At the end of the day, this is about the student-athletes.
I would say, again, this isn’t the format for me to go full boat in this. I would say if we make decisions about these kids, what’s right for these kids, we’re going to be right. If the NBA is worried about the NBA, and if the NCAA is worried about the NCAA, if each individual institution is just worried about themselves, and the last thing we think about are these kids, we’re going to make wrong decisions.
… Q. There’s a decent chance that next week Rick Pitino won’t be the coach at Louisville. Will you miss the rivalry in coaching against him?
JOHN CALIPARI: Look, it’s unfortunate, all the stuff that’s come down. But let’s talk about my team, please. Does anyone here have a question about my team, please?
Q. One more question about the FBI.
JOHN CALIPARI: Anybody have a question?
Q. Wait a minute. This is a Media Day, not Coach Day. I am entitled to ask a question.
JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.
Q. You cannot answer it, fine.
JOHN CALIPARI: Ask it.
Q. The FBI reportedly has expanded into looking at Nike. Kentucky is a Nike school. What reassurance would you give your fan base, the Big Blue Nation, if they’re anxious about what this could mean?
JOHN CALIPARI: Again, you’re asking like you know something that I don’t know.
Q. That’s all I know is right there. If a fan would put two and two together…
JOHN CALIPARI: Wait a minute. We don’t know what you’re saying, if it’s true. Do we know if it’s true?
Q. It’s been reported.
JOHN CALIPARI: Oh, that makes it true.
I have no comment to it. I mean, we haven’t been contacted. The NCAA hasn’t contacted us. We’re going about our business of coaching this team.
How about a basketball question since it isn’t my day.
Did you click on that first Calipari link? The one that takes you to years of coverage of this vile, greedy, cynic? I think you should.
October 13th, 2017 at 4:34PM
The word is that Pitino and Calipari want the fierce pitbulls of the NCAA to take over the whole investigation. Now that the NCAA has completed its exhaustive investigation of UNC and issued a verdict of See No Evil, Hear No Evil, and Speak No Evil, they have plenty of time on their hands.
October 13th, 2017 at 5:30PM
tp: Yes. Put the NCAA in charge.
October 13th, 2017 at 6:28PM
Say what you will about the NCAA and UNC, the fact is, the academic side is not the NCAA’s domain. The test is going to be what SACS does. If UNC does not get hammered when it’s next up for reaccreditation then we really should abandon the whole accreditation process because it clearly is meaningless.
October 13th, 2017 at 7:26PM
SAS is already done with the UNC situation. UNC was on probation for a year.
October 13th, 2017 at 11:37PM
What saved UNC’s bacon (at least in terms of the NCAA) was the fact that the sham courses were apparently available to athletes and non-athletes alike. Had this been a special benefit available only to athletes, I suspect the NCAA would have hit them with scholarship cuts and post-season bans (which would still have been a weak response, of course). But at the end of the day, as dcat says, you really don’t want the NCAA ruling on the academic integrity of college courses.
The NCAA is horrible in a thousand ways, but in this particular case, the blame largely rests with the academic officials at the University of North Carolina for allowing this travesty to occur and with SACS for letting the university off the hook so soon. A great university prostituted itself in the pursuit of football and basketball glory, and, with the exception of a few resignations, they pretty much got away with it.
October 14th, 2017 at 7:16AM
to quote a UNC friend:
“we beat the rap by arguing, in effect, that any UNC degree might be worthless, not just athletes’
October 14th, 2017 at 7:17AM
John: I’ll use this as my post’s headline, if I may.
October 14th, 2017 at 10:06AM
Way, way back in 06, the NYAG issued the results of their investigation of uni defrauding students via financial aid packages. Institutions were getting kickbacks for funneling borrowers to certain lenders. You would think a uni having grifters on their payroll would be cause to lose accreditation. Hell no, that didn’t happen. As far as I know, no one went to prison, either.
If TPTB weren’t going to keep taxpayer money outta the hands of short fingered uni admins, what makes anyone think they’re going judicial regarding UNC’s No Class At All curriculum??
October 16th, 2017 at 7:13AM
We’re not talking about whether “Rocks for Jocks” is a valid course (or whatever other gut course is in question), but phony courses, period. The NCAA is creating a galaxy-sized loophole here: spread the bennies of the phony courses outside the circle of varsity athletes, and you’re golden.
October 16th, 2017 at 9:29PM
theprofessor —
Respectfully, the NCAA has no jurisdiction in academic matters. Yes, they are creating a loophole that if universities exploit deserves to be punished by academic bodies. So let’s shame the academic bodies, from the academic program at the heart of this to the college where that program is housed to the University admin, to the regents.
Otherwise, can the NCAA start making curricular demands? All college sports teams must have tutoring sessions carried out by professors. All college athletes must get a full, official grade report every three weeks. All college athletes must be allowed to sit in the front row of all classes. All classes with college athletes must have their syllabi approved by the AD to make sure they adhere to new NCAA standards …
Making concessions to the NCAA to punish based on academics simply opens doors we do not want opened. What happened at UNC is shameful. But SACS giving them one year of probation is the worst of this, not the NCAA deciding they do not have jurisdiction where we do not want them having jurisdiction.
October 17th, 2017 at 2:11PM
We can agree that SACS is a joke and a disgrace. Our own accreditor, HLC, is an even bigger joke and on-going fraud perpetrated against the public interest, which it is supposed to serve.
There is no way to cleave cleanly athletics from academics at the D-I level. The NCAA is up to its eyeballs in academics–it prescribes certain minimum test scores, GPAs, and core courses simply for high school athletes to qualify for D-I or D-II. The stated purpose of the APR system is, in the NCAA’s words, “…to ensure Division I student-athletes receive exemplary educational and intercollegiate-athletics experiences.” If it seriously believes that fake courses are exemplary educational experiences, it needs to stop all of its blah-blah about participants being students first and athletes second. The reality is that the UNC coaches knew that these were fake academic courses, they aggressively pushed their players into them, and they even nagged good old Julius for even greater laxity.
Curricular demands? All college athletes must get a full, official grade report every three weeks.–How about every two weeks? We have had that for some teams. Now, you will say, the NCAA did not mandate that, although the coaches will cheerfully blame the NCAA. The AD himself, when pressed, will admit that it isn’t in fact a mandate, but how else are they to ensure that they meet the NCAA-mandated GPA and progress toward graduation requirements? College athletics has instituted a network of finger-pointing to scatter and deflect blame: the athletes and the coaches blame the NCAA, the ADs blame the coaches and the NCAA, the university presidents blame the NCAA and the conferences, the NCAA blames the institutions, and so on. At the end of the day, we get absurd conclusions like the UNC case: it’s all the fault of a rogue department chair and his even roguier secretary.