No one in New Orleans has more to lose this weekend than Kentucky coach John Calipari, with his team the overwhelming Final Four favorite and Bluegrass State bragging rights at stake against Louisville. But Dickie V has his back.
ESPN’s most colorful college hoops analyst had unrelenting praise for Calipari during a teleconference with reporters, saving his most unbridled enthusiasm for an attack on the NCAA, which has ensured Calipari’s legacy is forever tarnished.
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“You can talk about vacate, schmacate, they can call it anything they want,” Dick Vitale said of Calipari’s Final Four trips with Memphis in 2008 and Massachusetts in 1996. “They should be ashamed of themselves. They walked in on Memphis and sat there on three occasions and told the administrators flat up and down, ‘You can play Derrick Rose,’ … and now they say, ‘You’ve got to vacate it.’ Why don’t they take the burden and blame for maybe not doing their job effectively at the right time?”
As for UMass, whose Final Four was erased over Marcus Camby’s acceptance of money from two sports agents, Vitale said: “Come on now, the bottom line is they went out and won those games, and to me, I don’t buy that vacate nonsense. I don’t buy it. I don’t believe it.”
Vitale said Calipari’s success with the Wildcats was proof he is motivating, recruiting and teaching.
“If you want to be anti-John, he will give you some ammunition,” Vitale said. “If you want to be pro-John, he’ll give you a lot of ammunition to praise him. But I sometimes don’t think he gets his due as a guy that can more than recruit. That man can coach.”
– Craig Stouffer
