Driving to Thursday's Graves County-Mayfield baseball game, I stumbled onto an out-of-season "Big Blue Line" radio show with Kentucky coach John Calipari.
The same thought occurred to me as I was listening to the call-in show that did when I had turned away from the television during Calipari's initial UK press conference ... close your eyes, and you would swear Calipari was Rick Pitino about 15-20 years later. They have the same accent (Yankee) and know exactly how and what to say to whip the fan base into a frenzy.
Some have referred to Calipari as Pitino Lite, noting that both took New England schools to the Final Four (Calipari ruled the Atlantic-10 at Massachusetts while Pitino at Providence in the tougher Big East) before skipping off to the NBA (Pitino with the Knicks, Calipari across the Hudson at New Jersey) before returning to take the college game by storm.
The analogy works, but it ends when you compare the two. Calipari is Pitino's equal, both in terms of coaching and marketing himself and his program. Calipari has UK fans eating out of the palm of his hand by telling them exactly what they want to hear, judging from these (sometimes paraphrased) comments:
"We're playing for the number one seed in the NCAA tournament."
"If we get the guys we want, we'll play anybody."
"Duke doesn't want to play us."
The guy is good. Real good. And he has the track record to back it up.
UK basketball is going to be really interesting to watch for the next few years.
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I don't think he'll win 30 plus games a year, like he did at Memphis, but I think he'll be successful as he knows how the current system works. He's very hooked up with the AAU handlers with the "one and out" kids, and he's not a bad coach. He's more like Jim Calhoun than Pitino. He'll need to adjust to the situation in Lexington, where there are more "eyes" watching him. National Championship? He needs to get better at teaching kids to shoot free throws, but, yeah, they'll be better.
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