Smoke Without Fire

This fall, John Calipari will begin his third season as Kenucky's head basketball coach. And for the third year in a row, Calipari's incoming freshman class is ranked as the nation's best.

Like Calipari, Pete Carroll rode top recruiting classes to his program's glory, as did perennial top 10-recruiter Jim Tressel. And in the past two weeks, Tressel's employment and Carroll's 2004 BCS Championship have been erased because of benefits their players improperly received.

To the casual fan, these two steps must seem like an inevitable major college sports lifecycle that is exposed every few weeks at another major program. Phase 1: Improve recruiting; Phase 2: Be exposed for running a program that improperly benefits its players.

Calipari has obviously demonstrated a mastery of the first phase, not just at Kentucky. And virtually nobody outside of the commonwealth would be surprised if he met the second in the near future.

But this is the wrong way to judge Calipari. While his past is certainly scented with more than a hint of impropriety smoke, he has never been burned by recruiting violation fire in the way that Tressel, Carroll, Bruce Pearl, and so many others have.

Calipari is the best recruiter in college basketball. And for that alone, many conclude he must be leveraging some illegal advantage.

Yet, the reality of his position does not make the source of this advantage clear. The Kentucky basketball nation is a large and passionate fan base, but they are not the Yankees. If college basketball were merely a free agent fundraising campaign, UK would do well just to compete with Duke, UCLA, and others. And Kentucky money would have had nothing to do with Derrick Rose or Tyreke Evans going to Memphis under Calipari.

Moreover, if Kentucky would be hard-pressed to compete with other programs' dollars, imagine the underdog it would be based on locale. While Lexington has its beautiful pastoral side, there are plenty of major college programs in generally more desirable locations. It is difficult to envision a top recruit punctuating his commitment announcement by "taking his talents to Lex Vegas."

Many accurately link Calipari's success with his access to a network of influential characters, including Worldwide Wes and Sonny Vaccaro. This is the most legitimate reason to believe recruits have selected Calipari's programs en masse. But if these relationships give Calipari such an edge in recruiting, what does that say about his peers? Calipari's BlackBerry was not stolen or bestowed to him. He earned each of those names and numbers over time.

In "Dazed and Confused," Matthew McConaughey's Wooderson creepily proclaims his love for high school girls because while he gets older, they stay the same age. Unfortunately for college basketball fans, this same phenomenon works against our affinity for hoops recruits.

For each of us, the march of time beyond college age separates us from any perspective we might share with 18-year-old basketball prospects (or at least it should). Every year, we get older and our interests change, but what catches the eye of a recruit stays the same.

And Calipari, more than any other coach, has found a dependable way to attract high profile young athletes. Cash, cars, and tattoos will work for some time, but the graveyard of coaches whose careers were cut short by cash-and-turn recruiting is running out of plots. Instead, the cocktail of charisma and star power Calipari has developed over time seems sustainable.

Jadedly assuming Calipari's professional demise is just around the corner is akin to reminding ourselves that we all will die eventually. Sure, everyone has a last day; but to assume that makes the quality of what is between now and then insignificant is to completely miss the point.

Keeping a run-of-the-mill secret is hard today. For the coach of a program as weighty as UK, for an individual as targeted as Calipari, for a process as open as high school recruiting? That kind of secret would be Oswald-grassy-knoll-impossible to keep.

Calipari's connections and image certainly do not suggest a choir boy in the church of NCAA rules. But then again, we all thought Jim Tressel's did.

The most recent round of NCAA scandals has reminded us that no major college coach should be considered "clean." But for all of the innuendo and scorn of his peers, John Calipari has risen to as elite a job as his profession offers after 20 years of high scrutiny. If he blatantly disregarded the rules during that rise, we would have known by now. Like baseball players whose success is clouded by steroid skepticism, Calipari can blame his peers in large part for his ill repute.

And that is a shame, because success should never be a cause for fault.

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