The always slimy John Calipari slithered his way to another big deal last week when he left his post at the University of Memphis for the coveted position at the University of Kentucky.
With a huge contract – eight years and 34 million dollars – waiting for him in the Bluegrass State, Calipari left behind a core of talented players and the nation’s best recruiting class, which raises some precarious questions.
Calipari’s move is nothing new. College coaches are consistently moving from college town to college town in search of the most notoriety and biggest payday. But what this sort of culture creates is a very uneven balance on the college sports scene.
Coaches are able to move without regard for what they’re leaving behind. Players are stranded without the coach with whom they agreed to play. And while coaches are raking in millions of dollars, landing endorsement deals and living the high life, players are left to sort out their futures without their coach.
This is simply not fair.
Players attend schools, in no small part, because of the coaches that they have interacted with. When these coaches skip town, it leaves a void in that player’s life. In some cases, the players are allowed to back out of their scholarship without repercussion. In others, players would be forced to sit out an always-valuable year in order to follow suit.
Solution?
Coaches should either stay put or players should be compenstated for their efforts. While it seems like a bold move, it’s really just giving the athlete their due at the end of the day.
If coaches can have their woes softened by million-dollar deals, then players should get their share of the buck.
In the last couple of weeks, news stories have surfaced about just how lucrative college sports can be.
The NCAA, it turns out, has a billion dollar – yes, billion – TV deal to air the tournaments. Meaning that at the very least, college basketball, and other sports for that matter, are lucrative on the largest scale.
It’s also been reported that UConn basketball turned a profit of $8 million last year, again reminding us that people’s wallets are getting fat on the backs of student-athletes across the country.
It’s only right that players get a cut of this money. Scholarships are not enough. If some of the money is taken out of the coach’s and administrators’ hands and placed in the hands of student athletes, it will do a number of important things.
That way, coaches aren’t the only one’s benefitting from athletes hard work.
USM has been lucky in terms of their coaches. At USM, consistency and longevity are the name of the game.
Take a look at the school’s two pre-emininent programs, baseball and women’s basketball. In both cases, the teams have been led to the top by coaches serving long tenures.
And it’s not as though Ed Flaherty and Gary Fifield couldn’t have hightailed it somewhere else. Both are on top of their game and have a lot to offer other prospective schools. Any D-1 program in the country would be lucky to have those two men at the helm of their programs.
Nevertheless, they’ve stuck around and built a really great thing in Gorham. And it is thanks to that consistency that those programs have been able to succeed. Players know (or in Fifield’s case knew) what they were going to get. They knew they wouldn’t be stranded. And that’s important.