Kentucky Wildcat Basketball: Kentucky vs the NCAA – 500 or not 500

As far as the NCAA goes, this is all pretty petty and stupid, to be honest.

Jerry Tipton wrote an article today in which he detailed the ongoing tug of war between the NCAA and UK over John Calipari’s 500th NCAA coaching victory.  Seems that after Kentucky defeated Florida 76-68 on February 26, UK presented Calipari with a special gameball for his 500th victory and included the above homage on the UKAA website.

But according the the NCAA, that win over Florida was victory 458 due to their stupid punishment of “vacating wins”.  That’s fine that the NCAA wants to issue a public retraction of the win in an attempt to pretend that anyone cares about their stupid penalty.  But the NCAA wants Kentucky to retract the acknowledgement of number 500 as well and presumably wants UK to storm into John Calipari’s private trophy room and deflate the game ball and zap everyone that witnessed that game with a “Men in Black”   Or better yet, zap anyone who watched UMass’s and Memphis’s Final Four runs with the zapper:

Apparently, the memory zapper does not work on large numbers and the only time in history that is has been successfully used was when Coach K zapped the NCAA and erased all their memories of Corey Maggette and his receiving improper benefits while at Duke.

All joking aside, this appears to be a serious situation for the NCAA and Kentucky may have to appear before the board of infractions and it’s chairman  Dennis Thomas:

"More than once in his five-page letter, Thomas wrote of how UK’s handling of Calipari’s victory total was “troubling,” “extremely troubling” and “very troubling” to the Committee on Infractions.If UK did not agree, Thomas said school officials would be asked to make an in-person appearance before the committee."

Supposedly, this tug of war over Calipari’s win total has been going on since before that Kentucky/Florida game.  Sandy Bell, UK’s compliance director, contacted the NCAA before the game and got a typically glib answer from the NCAA and went with what she thought was the best interpretation:

"Bell wrote Todd on April 5 that the response from Gary Johnson, the person who heads men’s basketball statistics for the NCAA, was: “You can say he has 1,000 wins if you want. But if you want to agree with what his official record is, then you have to account for those vacates.”Bell said UK interpreted that to mean it could recognize 500 or more victories as long as it “accounted” for the vacates.Thomas disagreed. “Recognizing Mr. Calipari for a fictitious 500th win does not properly ‘account’ for the vacation of wins,” he wrote Todd."

Once again, it’s all rather stupid.  It’s the same debate that raged about Mark McGwire and the stupid *.  Things happen.  There is no reason to pretend that it did not exist.  The teams that beat Calipari during those two seasons still get to count the win in their victory total.  Shouldn’t those wins be erased as well?  If the NCAA wants to slap an * on every achievement in their record books, so be it.  All Kentucky and Sandy Bell was trying to do was honor Calipari for an achievement he accomplished:

"“Our only intention was to recognize the fact that, during his career, Coach John Calipari had indeed led his teams to 500 victories on the court,” Bell wrote Todd on April 5. “Regardless of how the 42 victories are statistically noted, they did in fact occur.”"

Personally, I think the most telling thing about whether Cal has 500 wins or not comes from the UMass official website, who issued a congratulations to Calipari on February 26 and stated that he had a record of 193-71 at UMass.  No drama.  No asterisks. 

So what’s next?  Is the NCAA going to go after UMass for not slapping a disclaimer on those four wins?

Perhaps the best approach for UK is to take the Wikipedia approach, which lists Calipari’s total win record and throws an * by it and says the NCAA does not recognize these games.  The man has won 500 games.  Get over it.

You would think with their limited resources, the NCAA has better things to do.

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