eleem
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Member # 884
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posted 03-30-2015 02:53 PM
History is a slippery, protean beast. It’s hard to hold on to, and it will show you many faces at the same time. Say, for example, you’re a team that’s trying to become the first men’s Division I college basketball team in nearly 40 years to go through an entire season undefeated, all the way to a national championship. You’ve already got history by its greasy tail. Every game you win, your grip gets both a little stronger and a little more unsure, because, by now, the team that beats you will grab ahold of history, too. That is what happened on Saturday, when Notre Dame caught Kentucky on a night that might have been The Night. But it wasn’t, and now Kentucky moves along to a Final Four with history in its grasp, but knowing now how easily it can slip away.
More March Madness
All the Grantland coverage of the 2015 NCAA tournament, right here.There is more than a little history to spare in the other three teams even before you talk about Kentucky. Mike Krzyzewski now has been to as many Final Fours as John Wooden. (Let us pause for a moment to recall that Wooden’s UCLA teams won nearly every damn time they were there.) Tom Izzo won the Battle Of The March Pains In The Ass over Rick Pitino and Louisville, which brings Izzo to his seventh Final Four. Wisconsin’s Bo Ryan is a finalist for this year’s induction class into the Basketball Hall of Fame. So is the coach of the team he’s playing. And thereby hangs the real tale of what has happened already in this tournament, and what’s to come.
It has been John Calipari’s March Madness, for good or ill. In the years since he coached UMass to a Final Four appearance that no longer counts in the record books — and since he coached Memphis to a Final Four appearance that no longer counts, either — a lot has changed in college athletics. The NCAA model, under which Calipari’s first two Final Fours had been rendered nonevents, has come under siege from so many angles, and in so many places, that it now functions as little more than an object of ridicule. As that occurred, Calipari has been rehabilitated as the first coach to succeed under what may be the new paradigm of college athletics — a pure business model, an honest transaction between the athletes and the institutions that their efforts enrich. The one-and-done philosophy that has been the source of Calipari’s success at Kentucky now looks less like a completely cynical exercise in brand-building and more like a realistic appraisal of how to operate within an enterprise that is being reformed from the outside in. The fact that it nonetheless remains a completely cynical exercise is beside the point — and the only thing that keeps the universe from dissolving in a pool of cognitive dissonance is that Calipari insists on draping the new paradigm with his own gussied-up version of the tattered nobility of the previous one.
“Look, I keep saying this: Twenty-five years ago an NBA contract was worth $125,000,” he said before Saturday night’s game. “If you’re in the top 10 picks [now], you’re going to make $25 million on your first deal. Your second deal could be worth another $80, and it is going up. That it’s $80 million, $120 million for these families and their children and their dreams and aspirations. I have to respect that, and I do. But I also know we had 10 guys, four stayed that we didn’t expect. So who were the three that I was going to leave out? Whose child was I going to say, ‘You’re not playing and I’ll bury you to make it about you’?”
Yes, it becomes rather cluttered around the old roster when some of the players who you might have thought would be one-and-done come back to be two-and-dones, or even three-and-dones. What is a paradigm-smashing master of the new order of college sports supposed to do in this situation? It is an interesting problem to have, especially when you only have your players’ interests at heart. What a guy.
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Posts: 13248 | From: flatwoods,ky. | Registered: Oct 2000
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