Vacated Final Four trips taint Calipari’s Hall bid
NEW ORLEANS — One of the 10 best winning percentages of all time — better than Mike Krzyzewski’s and Bob Knight’s. More than 500 wins. Four teams to the Final Four. And today, perhaps, a national championship.
It’s a Hall of Fame coaching résumé even without the title. But will it make Kentucky’s John Calipari a Hall of Famer?
He’ll be an absorbing and likely polarizing candidate when he’s inevitably nominated. (Counting his two-plus seasons with the NBA’S New Jersey Nets, Calipari is two years shy of the 25-year head coaching minimum required for eligibility.) Beyond the numbers, there’s no escaping the Ncaa-imposed asterisks signifying that two of his Final Four appearances and 42 of his 546 career victories have been vacated be- cause of rules violations that put Massachusetts and Memphis on NCAA probation.
Calipari wasn’t implicated in either case but bears the tainted reputation.
“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone, OK?” says former Manhattan, St. John’s and New Mexico coach Fran Fraschilla, now an ESPN analyst. “As an ex-coach, I think I know where the bodies are buried when it comes to things like recruiting. When I see certain guys in the Hall of Fame and other guys who may not get in because people have cast aspersions on how they’ve run their programs, I find it almost amusing.”
Jerry Tarkanian illustrates the Hall of Fame resistance Calipari nonetheless expects to face. He coached UNLV to four Final Fours and won the 1990 national championship and 729 games overall, but sandwiched around that were three vacated NCAA appearances at Long Beach State and Fresno State. He’s one of only a handful of Division I coaches to have 500 or more wins and a national title and not made the Hall.
Even discounting the vacated victories, Calipari has averaged better than 25 wins in his 20 seasons as a college head coach. Count the vacated wins, and he got to 500 one game faster than John Wooden (who did it in 652) and two faster than Dean Smith (653).
“He is, in my mind, one of the premier coaches in the country. Forget recruiting; coaching,” Kansas coach Bill Self says. “He gets guys to play totally unselfish. . . . And he gets them better.”