Players first, but beleaguered coaches are also near to Calipari's heart
John Calipari has done all he can to build a brand as a "player's first" coach.
But his comments before and after Kentucky's win against Missouri are the latest evidence that there's no greater defender of embattled fellow coaches in the game.
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This is the coach who went so far as to write a book titled, "Players First: Coaching from the inside out."
It's an accessible exposition of his overarching philosophy as head of a major college basketball program, but it's also a revolutionary approach that could be applied by management in just about any field.
The player's first approach is effectively an inversion of the traditionally accepted, "Team first," concept, that was a universally accepted maxim in virtually every conceivable sport that involves teams.
It's a revolutionary idea, indeed, but it need not be as offensive to pious sensibilities as it seems to be for traditionalists in basketball, management and life. It's not that Calipari has thrown the team concept out the window. Instead, he insists that when a coach, a staff and an institution put their individual student-athletes first, they gain the necessary trust and forge the motivation that are the essential ingredients in the success of the greater whole.
It's a reversal in emphasis and truly different on some practical levels, but the end-goal isn't as earth-shaking as its feared to be by those who hear vestiges of that talk about the 2010 NBA Draft being the biggest day in Kentucky basketball history.
All of this is well known.
But these days Calipari is forging a very different identity within the greater basketball community. It's not a change in his personality, by any account, but it's a change in the extent of the public's recognition of something else that's near and dear to Calipari.
Player's first, yes. But coaches matter too.
Even the embattled ones.
In the last week or so alone Calipari has made national news with his passionate defense of Georgia's Mark Fox, who has come under some criticism in Athens for reaching two NCAA Tournaments in eight years (without any wins in the Big Dance during that time). And in the same long-winded but widely-praised postgame monologue after UK's win over the Bulldogs, he managed to speak out on behalf of the beleaguered Mark Gottfried of NC State, who has produced results that exceed the Wolfpack's averages and standard over the past quarter-century, but is currently overseeing a trainwreck of a 2016-17 team that can't stop getting blown out.
Calipari's compassion for his less-favorably viewed coaching peers has clearly been near the front of his mind this year, and likely has been for some time before that, because after the Cats' win over Georgia he wasn't even asked about Fox's job security or his standing with Bulldog basketball supporters. He launched, unprompted, into that - well, call it a tirade or call it an impassioned plea - completely of his own accord, after being asked only about J.J. Frazier's performance.
"Here’s what bothers me about this profession right now: what Mark has been able to do here—and other coaches," Calipari said, before going on to point to Georgia's near-misses, close calls and moral victories.
What might be at the root of Calipari's very public display of solidarity and compassion?
He's been an unpopular coach before. Not so much at Kentucky, where there will always be some critics or impossible standard-bearers, but in stops before Lexington. Remember that NBA experiment? That could be part of it. Personal experience tends to make empathy a little easier.
But even now, at Kentucky, it seems that the softer, less ominous form of criticism Calipari hears over the course of an up-and-down season prompts him to think of those who aren't catching quite as many breaks or succeeding at such a level.
"And so, again, we want to win more," Calipari said. "No kidding, we all want to win more. Live with my shoes. Want to win more? You gotta win by 25. We got problems. We win by two or in overtime, people are jumping off bridges. So we all want to win, but it’s about what kind of coach it is, what kind of man he is, what—and it just—we’re firing coaches in midseason."
All this, Calipari's defense of Fox, has received plenty of press. His comments about Gottfried were well-documented on the same ESPN programming and in the same print and internet columns.
Perhaps the one place where Calipari's comments didn't sit so well was with the NC State fan base. NC State, the school that has courted Calipari in the past in a not-so-secret way, hasn't succeeded consistently in the ACC since the late 1980's, when a once-powerhouse program slowly went the way of Indiana, only it was that decline on steroids.
Calipari ruffled feathers in Raleigh because he pointed out that Gottfried's tenure has been filled with more NCAA Tournaments and Sweet Sixteen appearances than has been common there recently, with the clear implicit statement being that Wolfpack fans, boosters and power brokers should, in effect, remember who they are - and who they aren't.
But aside from their outrage, Calipari's comments were greeted with overwhelming positivity on television, in writing and by coaches who have addressed the issue since.
Calipari's defense of his comrades in coaching is a sure-fire way to endear him to those colleagues, because even many of the coaches who currently don't occupy hot seats have had that experience in the past. They can relate, personally, so Calipari's public, unprompted, raw and unfiltered reaction, amounting to a scathing indictment of modern expectations and practices, came as a welcomed megaphone moment.
Then there was Calipari going out of his way to praise the struggling Kim Anderson, coach of Missouri, on the SEC Teleconference. On that call Calipari used his weekly platform to say he doesn't much care to consider what a coach looks like when everything's going well or, as he put it, when they're riding a ten-game winning streak.
He flipped the tables and framed the conversation in terms of how to view a coach, instead, when things are going poorly. It wasn't a dismissal of all criticism as invalid, but it was a clever way of asking a different question, and taking the issue on from a different angle.
Missouri fans put off by the Tigers' 7-20 record, even if impressed with the team's effort against Kentucky, are unlikely to be swayed into passionate Anderson supporters on the basis of Calipari's words. In fact, whenever Calipari defends an unpopular peer the side effect, unfortunate for Calipari's cause and the coach he's defending, is that it appears as though he's all-too-content with the status quo as a successful coach in a league full of, well, less successful coaches.
During that same teleconference appearance Calipari was so intent on defending Anderson from a firestorm of criticism that he said the Tigers are actually a better shooting team than they're given credit for, and that's why they're dangerous. Incidentally, Missouri isn't a good shooting team and ranked 341st in three-point field goal percentage going into the Kentucky game (pretty good evidence their poor shooting night against the Cats was not a fluke, but in character).
The validity of that point aside, Calipari's passion on this point can't be called into question. It's too visceral; too consistent. And it seems personal. These have been his experiences just as they're now the struggles of others, and many of these under the proverbial gun are his friends.
Those who perennially wade in the waters of cynicism will always have an easy time finding a possibly nefarious motive in Calipari, who has been mainstreamed in some respects by his time at Kentucky, but remains a polarizing lightning rod. Kentucky fans themselves can probably relate to this side effect, just mentioned, because when public discontent with Tubby Smith was at its widest, deepest level, the frequent outside and national appeals to his his character and decency seemed to make the vitriol worse.
After the Missouri game Calipari didn't relent. He stayed on point. Like a good politician well-versed in disciplined messaging, Calipari marched forward in the cause of compassion for unpopular coaches in what Mitch Barnhart would probably call our "microwave society."
Calipari didn't even wait for a question. He devoted his opening statement to the same theme he's harped on all week, only this time holding up Anderson as underrated, in effect, rather than Fox or Gottfried.
“Let me say this before we get started: I’ve watched tape the last couple days, watched it on the airplane and I knew we were coming here and I didn’t know much about the team," Calipari said. "I watched the tape. And I told Kim (Anderson) before the game: For a team to be struggling win-loss wise—and I watched the Arkansas game. I watched the Vanderbilt game. I watched the Alabama game. I watched the Texas A&M game. And then I just watched them here fight like crazy. I’m going to say it again: That is coaching. They haven’t let go of the rope here."
There's no way to address the temperature of a given coach's seat without a degree of awkwardness.
Anderson, when asked for his reaction to Calipari's comments in defense of him (with the "rope" comment included for context) seemed to pause and find some humor in the candidness of the Kentucky coach.
He expressed his lack of surprise that Calipari would make such comments, seeming to understand that this is just who Kentucky's coach is all the time, but it's an awkward position for any coach to be in when there's talk of his 7-20 team deserving praise simply for not quitting. In the big picture Anderson probably appreciated the vote of confidence from such an overpowering figure in the sport, but whatever goodwill Anderson might have gained nationally by Calipari's praise, he probably realized it didn't do anything to calm restless natives.
It's easy to imagine message boards and talk radio callers complaining about Kentucky's coach hoping a floundering Missouri coach sticks around, with a not-so-subtle accusation of self-interest behind the kind words and friendly face.
But those would be fans, i.e. fanatics, and even Calipari's most cynical critics should be able to concede that this is an issue that the coach is genuinely passionate about.
Anderson knows it from personal experience, and he's known it for a lot longer than the last week.
“There is nobody in America that is more supportive of coaches than John Calipari," Anderson said. "I go sit in coaches’ meetings with him and he is supportive of everybody else. He could very easily take a nap during the meetings, but he is supportive of everybody and he fights for all the coaches. I told him before the game that I appreciate the way that he has supported coaches in general.”
No doubt, many other coaches in Anderson's current situation, or predicament, probably feel the same way. It's just unlikely that even someone with a platform as big and a megaphone as loud as Calipari's will have any real ability to talk disgruntled fans into patience and perspective. And truthfully, in many cases even the harsher forms of criticism might be fair.
There's another development related to this emphasis by Calipari, and that's the broader acceptance he's enjoying and, even more, being embraced by college basketball coaches. When an anonymous survey conducted by CBSSports.com in 2012 asked college basketball coaches who the "biggest cheater in the sport" was, Calipari was the most popular answer (36-percent, ahead of Bryce Drew's 34-percent).
Some of that is undoubtedly sour grapes, some probably rooted in conviction. But it would be interesting to see the results of a similar poll if conducted today.
Calipari's long-standing perceived feud and bitter rivalry with Rick Pitino culminated in the two Italian-American basketball gurus laughing and joking over a cordial podcast released shortly after Louisville defeated Kentucky.
Also on the podcast? Current No. 1 recruiting archrival Coach K of Duke. That's to say nothing of Calipari's well-known friendship with UNC's Roy Williams, who has charted a very different course in Chapel Hill. The two are so friendly that Williams can now freely acknowledge, without the blinders of competitive ego, that he wants the players Calipari gets. He just doesn't get them.
This is a coach who means what he says when he defends other coaches. There's no reason to believe that alone is making Calipari a more beloved figure amongst his college coaching peers, but there may be plenty of anecdotal evidence to suggest that it's one of several reasons that he's moved beyond the realm of being tolerated or even just accepted. A more mainstreamed, less controversial Calipari seems to have built up quite a bit of goodwill in the confraternity of coaches.
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