When a school is committed to winning, they will do what it takes to hire the right coach.
When a school has competent leadership, they are prepared to execute their job responsibilities at all times.
When a school is competently run – like Kentucky, Alabama, Virginia and others – the hiring of a coach doesn’t take a month or a nervous breakdown by the Athletics Director resulting in the loss of 20% of his body weight.
A source told Katz that Calipari will receive an eight-year, $35 million deal. He gets a $2.5 million signing bonus and $3 million per year for the first four years. In years five, six, seven and eight, Calipari will get an additional $1.5 million per year, so for the last four years of the contract his salary would be $4.5 million. Incentives push the deal up a few more million to get to the $35 million mark.
For the record – when NC State’s job opened in 2006, Lee Fowler did not connect with John Calipari until at approximately Thursday (following the job becoming open on Saturday). You probably remember the embarrassment of the NC State ‘leadership’ getting caught by the local news media returning from a Sunday afternoon meeting with Calipari in Memphis to meet (Link to old entry of plane tracking #1; Link to ‘Da Plane, Da Plane‘). The next night – Monday – Calipari and his assistants visited Raleigh to ‘view our facilities’. In short, more days passed before Lee Fowler initially contacted John Calipari about our job three years ago than passed for the University of Kentucky to actually hire John Calipari.
Praise for this move is everywhere – from Mike DeCourcy to Seth Davis to almost every member of the media in the country who does not live in Memphis.
How does this impact the John Wall sweepstakes? Will NC State have another opportunity to lure DeMarcus Cousins to Raleigh? Who knows? SI.com is talking about this relative to its impact on recruiting.
The drama now will center on the makeup of Calipari’s first recruiting class in Lexington, which could include a number of players who were previously committed to Memphis.
Five-star center DeMarcus Cousins, a late pledge who has not signed an official letter of intent, is one of them, as are guards Nolan Dennis and Xavier Henry, both of whom had opt-out clauses in their commitments to Memphis in the event that Calipari left.
Unsigned point guard John Wall, considered by many to be the top player in the Class of 2010, had been leaning toward playing for Memphis, and may now consider UK, Duke, Kansas, Miami and Baylor instead. New York prep star Lance Stephenson, who had been expected to commit to Kansas on Tuesday at the McDonald’s All-America game, also curiously delayed his announcement, although he may only be waiting for one of either Sherron Collins or Cole Aldrich to turn pro.
As you read all of these articles about how good a fit Cal is at UK, please allow me to remind you:
That tale, the quintessential John Calipari story, is why he is the perfect coach for North Carolina State, and the Wolfpack know it. It is not because of who he would make happy (State alums), but who he would drive nuts, namely Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams.
That has to be what State really wants – to be relevant, to be feared, to matter again to its local rivals, Duke and North Carolina. To get that, it has to have a coach who will get under the big two’s skin, wage war in the media, steal recruits and road wins, basically give the Wolfpack both the bark and the bite they’ve lacked.
