Kentucky Basketball: Catching Up With the NCAA Question

he is not the only current coach that has NCAA issues. Had George Mason not beaten UCONN then I forsee that Jim C would have that final four vacated. Roy Willimas left Kansas and Kansas the next year was put under NCAA restrictioins.

You see there is a difference in what Kelvin Sampson did and what has happened under Calipari. Kelvin was directly implicated in the investigations…….twice. Calipari’s issue is recruiting blue chip players and then those players do something they aren’t supposed to do. This will continue to happen under any coach until very tight measures are taken and I am not even talking about the TMZ"issues". Maybe coach doesn’t do enough to make sure his recruits are eligible I don’t know. I am not there. I do think though what is lacking is putting the finger of blame where it actually lies and that is with the player. I don’t see Derrick Rose getting slammed by Memphis fans or the media. I don’t see Marcus Camby getting slammed by the media. By the way I still find it quite ironic that Calipari gets called a cheater when he turned Camby in himself(I mean seriously folks, what coach do you know would have done that). Oh and lets add Tim Floyd to that mix……..I don’t see the media in an uproar about him either. I am a very practical and fair person. I put the blame where the blame is.

The captain of the Titanic did not follow proper protocol and ignored warning signs. Calipari has not done so.

Calipari is more culpable in the Memphis situation than in the UMass affair. He allowed Reggie Rose to travel on the team plane, and he didn’t have to do that. It isn’t as if his brother could have walked off the team if he told Reggie to take a hike. Calipari did not get blame from the NCAA for that, and the compliance officer should have nixed that deal if he were doing his job, but that didn’t happen.

NCAA compliance does not begin or end with the coach, but with the school. The coach is paid to recruit the best available players, form them into a team and win. As long as the coach does not ignore obvious red flags or become complicit in actions that violate NCAA rules, or fail to disclose information that he knows about the players he recruits to the school’s compliance department or otherwise fail his part in due diligence, it is ridiculous to blame him for the actions of his charges.

The argument that “The captain of the ship gets the blame” is invalid, not just because coaching an NCAA program and captaining a ship are inherently dissimilar, but also because of the type of circumstances surrounding each case. A captain is the last word in every decision on a ship, but not so with the coach of a basketball team. He answers not only to his boss the athletics director, but also has to operate through the filter of the parallel chain of command in the of the compliance office. A failure of compliance cannot fairly be imputed to the coach unless the failure was due to his negligence or unethical conduct. Calipari, to the knowledge of anyone, has never been complicit in either.

Your comments are a variant of the “questionable cause” logical fallacy, combined with the fallacy of division and circumstantial ad-hominem:

• The coach is often not the proximate cause of the violation, nor does it occur within the scope of his authority;
• The coach is in charge only of a subset of the university’s compliance process for the basketball, not all of it, and does not have authority over all of the process;
• The coach does not act in isolation in compliance matters, but in concert with others who have authority over him.

There are many other problems with this argument, but those alone are enough to invalidate it. This is also why you don’t see the NCAA issuing “show cause” penalties or unethical conduct charges to head coaches in many situations — they understand, even if you don’t, that compliance is the primary responsibility of the institution and not the head coach. The coach plays an important part and can blow up the process, but the scope of his authority in compliance is not that broad.

No matter what, there are always going to be rumors of NCAA investigations surrounding UK. If it happens, we just have to hold on tight and hope for the best.

If we don’t trust our school, there is little to be done except contact the board of regents and complain. But I think we should trust them until they prove untrustworthy, and that includes Coach Cal.

It’s every coach’s job to push the limit. It is the job of the compliance department and athletics administration to keep them on the right side of the line. As long as Calipari does not hide anything, or do anything unethical, how can Calipari be culpable?

What warning signs is he ignoring, exactly? You have provided nothing whatever in the way of facts to support your argument, regardless of it’s logical validity.

You are simply mistaken about Calipari being like a military commander. The two things are not similar.

The reality is, though, that the exposition of these fallacies has more value than you think. A person who considers himself fair-minded will mark those comments and see the problem with the argument.

Those who have just made up their mind and don’t want to change it for anything, of course, are hopeless. I was not really responding to the commenter so much as to the many thousands of readers who don’t comment.

Jerry also said “She got the goldmine and I got the shaft”

Welcome to ASoB.

I think you have simply made up your mind without examining the facts. If you would open your mind and study the facts, even you could reach a different conclusion.

I fear that will not happen, however. Your arguments, such as they are, are rote, indefensible, and smack of a person who isn’t really interested to learn he might have come to the wrong conclusion or failed to fairly examine the issue thoroughly.

Good luck to you.

first off rumors have been flying since day one of the calipari hire so when unnamed sources start flying more rumors our way are we supposed to just throw calipari out because tmz said a “source” told them the ncaa is set to investigate uk? why part of this is a defense? not buying into unproven rumors and speculation, or is it waiting to see the actual facts of the situation .. IF there is a situation.. no like any fanbase we will wait untill actual facts are presented before rushing to judgement …. you know i was told by an unnamed source that bruce pear bangs tennessee female students, i was told by a unnamed source that pitino did rape sypher, i was told that coach k and bill self have a better relationship with www then calipari ever did. so going by calipari haters logic .. its all true right… oh thats right u want proof… so does the uk faithful

Your belief that my opinions are "rote, indefensible, and smack of a the person who isn’t really interested to learn he might have come to the wrong conclusion or failed to fairly examine the issue thoroughly" are very subjective and in this case incorrect.

I will listen to any argument, but you haven’t made one. Your position so far as you have articulated it seems to consist of the following:

• Calipari is responsible for the actions of his players when they are outside of his control, the “Captain gets the blame” argument. You followed this up by comparing Calipari to a military commander.
• Derrick Rose failing the test twice and passing it in Detroit was a red flag. I argued that was facially defensible.

In the case of the first argument, I demonstrated that it was not logical and therefore flawed. Being he head coach of a college basketball team is not similar to either a ship captain or a military commander because the responsibility for compliance does not lie primarily with the coach, but others. Your response to this was not to defend your original argument, but to simply reiterate your original fallacious argument in a different form with equal logical flaws. You simply cannot hold people accountable for things that are not their primary responsibility unless the are negligent, or willfully violate the rules themselves.

You have not demonstrated why Rose’s test process should have stopped Memphis’ recruitment of him. I pointed out that many players take the test multiple times, and many players have passed the test outside their home town. If Calipari had backed off Rose, it is undeniable that Illinois or any of a number of other schools would have offered him a scholarship. He facially met the qualifications, and there were no known objections to his test score until after the season.

The bottom line is that you have not demonstrated a case where Calipari is culpable in the Rose case, either by direct action or by negligence. As far as anyone knew at the time, Rose’s score was valid. The NCAA did an extensive review of his case, as with all PSA’s who have a test score increase, and the clearinghouse cleared him, as did Memphis’ compliance department. So how, exactly, is Calipari to blame?

Bottom line — your entire argument rests on your “Captain gets the blame” theory, which has been demonstrated to be both logically flawed by me and others and is clearly not a valid theory for the NCAA, who has declined to punish head coaches for these types of situations because they understand that compliance is primarily the duty of the school, not the head coach (see the recent decisions at USC and at UConn as well as Memphis). This is a straight-line logical conclusion and is not in any way subjective.

So if you can demonstrate some valid reason why we should be leery of Calipari, feel free to do so, I welcome it. But I have already discussed this at great length in other posts, and I hope you understand that it is tiresome to do it over and over again. It seems to me that nobody bothers to think for themselves anymore. Your position is straight out of the mainstream media commentary, which I have repeatedly debunked on this site ad nauseum.

I do apologize if my tone was too Spartan, I regret that.

Thanks for your comments, and have a great Fourth of July as well.

Calipari is unquestionably employing a strategy that has not been successfully used on an ongoing basis. He is clearly going to have to demand more of himself as a coach, given what happened last year.

I think we will see many fewer “one and dones” on this year’s team, and a consequent increase in experience. Lamb is not a “one and done”, neither is Poole, nor Jones, in my opinion. The only true “one and done” I see starting out is Kanter, although it is possible that Brandon Knight could do it as well.

We will agree to disagree about the standard to which a college basketball coach’s responsibility should extend. I will give you this example — when players engage in lawbreaking in their time away from the coaching staff, nobody ever calls for the coach’s head. Conversely, when they engage in NCAA rulebreaking (surely a much less serious offense, in the bigger scheme of things) everybody wants to blame the coach.

This is a clear indication of the break with reason the “blame Calipari” position contains. The two situations are identical insofar as the imputation of responsibility is concerned, yet nobody calls for coach Pearl’s head because of Tyler Smith’s felonious conduct. It is a double standard, a gross one, and a clear example of the failure of reason regarding Calipari. So I must suppose that in your capacity as leader, if one of your charges engaged in felonious conduct away from work, your job would be forfeit, or at least on the line and subject to censure. If so, I’m glad I don’t have that job.

You may not be guilty of the double standard I described above, but if you would consider Calipari unsuitable, you must consider Pearl and Pitino unsuitable as well, by the very standard you set. Pitino was found explicitly complicit in NCAA violations while he was an assistant at the University of Hawaii.

Second, UMass cannot be supporting evidence. The NCAA explicitly exonerated Calipari, who turned in Camby after he found out about the violations. The NCAA said that Calipari was a “victim” in the UMass case. It is beyond the pale to consider that affair “supporting evidence” in rulebreaking, since the only authority that matters gainsays you. It is one thing not to be mentioned as culpable in a report, but quite another to be explicitly absolved of wrongdoing.

Finally, Geoff Calkins’ article, if you consider that damning, is proof, to me, that you made up your mind about Calipari before fully examining the evidence. Calkins essentially claims, libelously in my view, that William Wesley arranged the fraudulent exam at the behest of Calipari. This is a conspiracy theory that is so bizarre and unsupported that anyone who accepts it, in my mind, is still looking for the shooter behind the grassy knoll. At the very least, Occam’s Razor cuts this to ribbons. Not only that, Calkins is a long-time Calipari foe who has made it his mission in life to blast Calipari at every possible turn, with or without supporting facts. That renders his opinions (which is all that piece is) highly suspect under the most favorable circumstances.

At the end of the day, what we have here is a disagreement which has no solution in debate. You have made up your mind, no matter what the facts say, because dots can be connected together if you postulate a bunch of facially unreasonable “what if’s”. But that’s always the case.

I have examined this situation in many comments, articles, and Internet research sessions. I am secure and comfortable in the belief that Calipari is a good head coach who plays by the rules. As such, in my opinion he is fully qualified to be the Kentucky head coach, and it is also my informed, considered, and arguably expert opinion that the characterization of him as unfit for the Kentucky job is unfair, unwarranted and unfounded in light of the known facts.