LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) — Kentucky is a basketball school — one that lost Bear Bryant to Texas A&M because Bryant loved to joke that his reward for a great season was a cigarette lighter while Adolph Rupp was given a Cadillac.
Kentucky is a basketball school — with a football program that will start the 2022 season as a consensus Top 25 team for the first time in 44 years.
Kentucky is a basketball school — with football coaches, players and fans that fire back with gusto when anybody tries to tell them to stay in their place. Especially former punters.
Now here is a college sports updated truth: Kentucky is a football school with a grand basketball tradition because in 2022 football matters most.
It's ok to be a football school and a basketball school. Mark Stoops has done a fabulous job building that program into, at the very least, a program that is very dangerous week-in and week-out. Here's @GaryParrishCBS on yesterday's bluegrass dramahttps://t.co/OieJzwyNnF
— Barrett Sallee (@BarrettSallee) August 12, 2022
John Calipari loves to play to the cameras, stomping his feet, scowling and delivering an exaggerated “Get Out!” gesture whenever a UK player makes a dumb play.
Calipari should thumb himself today.
Calipari turned the ball over this week in the Bahamas. He shot an air ball when he shared his frustration about not having an upgraded, best-in-the-universe practice facility by including the needless line that Kentucky is a basketball school the way Alabama and Georgia are football schools.
I don’t believe Calipari intended to demean the Kentucky football program or the women’s national championship volleyball program or the surging UK swimming and soccer programs or any other UK program.
But Calipari doesn’t grasp how out-of-touch basketball school talk is in 2022. Every Power 5 conference school is a football school.
Football drives television contracts. Football drives conference realignment. Football drives athletic departments revenue.
Kentucky is a football school that has a spectacular basketball tradition. But in 2022, when you live in the Southeastern Conference and Texas and Oklahoma are positioned to jump on your schedule to join Bama, Georgia and the other monsters, having a dynamite football program matters greatly.
It’s a football school!! 💙⚪️ pic.twitter.com/bPlCduxaNk
— joshua snead (@josnead) August 12, 2022
Kentucky does not have a dynamite football program — yet. But Stoops has pushed the Wildcats closer toward that status than any coach since Bryant took his cigarette lighter and moved on.
Stoops’ teams play winning and entertaining football. The Wildcats have dealt with tons of disrespect through the years. They don’t deserve more — unintentional or intentional — from a basketball coach whose whining about a new practice facility is as annoying as his whining about playing non-conference road games. They don't need their basketball coach giving negative recruiting material to other schools.
Kentucky basketball has every advantage that a coach could imagine.
There is the Ritz Carlton dormitory where the players live. There is the elite game day atmosphere at Rupp Arena. There is the tradition of excellence and success that stretches back for decades.
There is a string of former players with NBA success who maintain connections to the program.
There is the recent addition of a commitment to a Name/Image/Likeness program that had multiple players driving Porsches last winter.
I haven’t visited the Joe Craft Center practice facility for several seasons but let me share with you the first paragraph of the description I found on the ukathletics.com website:
“The Joe Craft Center, the $30 million state-of-the-art basketball practice facility, opened in January, 2007. The facility houses the men’s and women’s basketball teams plus many administrative and UK athletics staff offices.”
State of the art facility to program albatross in 15 years?
A former NBA scout who tours the country told me the Craft Center is one of the best practice facilities in the country. An outdated Craft Center is not the reason Kentucky missed the NCAA Tournament in 2021.
The practice facility is not the reason that Calipari’s team burped in the 2022 NCAA Tournament against Saint Peter’s, which shares a $6 million, 47-year-old facility with women’s basketball, women’s volleyball and men’s and women’s swimming.
Coaching is the reason.
Despite all of his advantages and superior talent, Calipari underachieved in 2021 and 2022. He whiffed. If he whiffs again this season, the grumbling will intensify.
If you’ve watched the relentless work that Stoops, his staff and the UK players have put in over the last decade, you can argue his football program has played closer to its potential than Calipari’s basketball program.
And if you practice the team-first mentality that you demand from your players, you don’t say things that make it more difficult for other UK athletic programs to succeed. Especially football.
Because in big-time college athletics in 2022, every school is a football school — including Kentucky.
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