John Calipari Says Dumb Thing About Jordan Spieth

John Calipari is a skilled basketball coach, but his real talent is for sales. We should not begrudge him this. The world needs salesmen just as it needs lawyers and journalists and any number of other professional irritants. Calipari might be a good man or he might be a bad one — I don’t know him — but his gift for salesmanship doesn’t inform the case one way or another.

What it does tell us, however, is that it’s usually safe to assume he’s working an angle.

I bring this up because Calipari made a daft and amusing point today about one-and-done basketball players that needs to be stricken from the record in the court of public opinion.

This is a defense of himself, of course, and Calipari is right in a technical sense: So far as I can tell, nobody has ever wondered aloud whether Jordan Spieth ruined college golf, while many have suggested that college basketball’s one-and-dones — to which Calipari is something like the Pied Piper — have ruined that game.

But Calipari’s rhetorical question misses a critical difference between college golf and college basketball: One of them is a TV show.

When people say college basketball is being ruined by early defections, they are talking about the (subjective) value of the sport as an entertainment product, in comparison to the past. Their reasoning is that the level of play is lower today than it has been in the past, because the best players don’t stick around as long as they used to, and this makes the game less entertaining.

Granted, it is hyperbole to say college basketball has been “ruined” by reduced quality of play or anything else, because the game’s popularity has never depended entirely on the quality of play in the first place. That’s part of it, but so are things like school spirit, geographical access and the perceived nobility of amateurism (such as it is). People watched the hell out of Aaron Craft.

And yet nobody disputes that the level of play is lower than it was 30 years ago. From that perspective, the game may have peaked as early as the 1979 NCAA Final, when Magic and Bird met in what remains the highest-rated game in college basketball history. That game appetized the public for a level of collegiate competition it would rarely see again.

As the principal beneficiary of the one-and-done era, Calipari has caught undue scorn for the diminished state of the college game. His job is to win championships for Kentucky, and he has done that by selling great high school players on the idea that if they will buy in for a year, they’ll have a great chance to not only get drafted, but win a championship along the way.

His track record of winning and sending his players to the NBA is the only argument he needs. John Calipari isn’t trying to make college basketball better, and neither is any other coach at his level. They need not feel any compulsion to pretend they are.

The reason nobody says Jordan Spieth ruined college golf isn’t because early departures don’t hurt it, it’s because nobody says anything about college golf at all.