Really?

Congratulations to the Kentucky Wildcats for winning their eighth NCAA title and their third going back to 1996. And congratulations to coach John Calipari for getting his first title after two previous unsuccessful trips to the Final Four. But shame on you Coach for ushering in the professionalization of college basketball. At least that's what Chuck Klosterman thinks. And for the record, Klosterman is out his mind for thinking this. In a piece from a few days ago on Grantland.com, Klosteman said the following:

Calipari has professionalized college sports, which is great for him and good for his recruits. It's just discomforting for anyone who likes NCAA basketball, assuming they're drawn to the same game that lives within their memory.

That is crap. Klosterman is saying that, by being upfront about what the deal is and not shying away from the best players just because they don't stay long, Calipari has turned college ball into a quid pro quo, where players get a clear path to the NBA and Calipari gets a winning team in return. Instead of a relationship with their coach, Calipari offers a business deal. He doesn't wax poetic about college life in an effort to get players to stay for three or four years; he puts them on display in a way that makes them attractive to pro scouts and counsels to go pro if and when the demand for their services is there. He doesn't try to sucker kids into staying on campus while he collects his multimillion dollar salary; if there's money there for them, he tells them to go get it. But that doesn't sit well with purists who want their college basketball magical, full of tales of freshman who fall short and redeem themselves as upperclassmen. Calipari has apparently ushered in a loss of innocence because he doesn't lie to his players about what the real game is.

That's nonsense. College basketball has been professionalized for decades. John Wooden fielded teams that were beneficiaries of the generosity of booster Sam Gilbert. Schools began scheduling late night games, knowing full well that their players had class the next morning, to accommodate television networks need for primetime programming. Conference tournaments, once a determinant for a conference's sole representative to the NCAA tournament that several conferences did not bother to hold, are now universal money grabs that the best teams don't even worry about winning anymore. And the sacred NCAA tournament has begun a creep to 128 teams not in the interest of fairness but of providing more television programming. College basketball became a business when it began to generate money, not when Calipari got hired at Kentucky.

A musing of Klosterman's later on in the piece gives away the game. Comparing what Calipari is doing to a certain NBA team, he laments:

It's not unlike the way most NBA observers are predisposed to root against the Miami Heat: You should not be able to succeed in this way. You should not be able to arbitrarily construct a Super Team that automatically achieves Super Greatness. It cheapens the experience. It feels cold and uncreative.

This is more garbage. Assembling superteams has been an NBA way of life for decades. The only difference is that before Miami it was always done in the front office by executives and not by players themselves. And the same way that many in the media considered that such a tragedy, people are apparently aghast that a college team was not built the old fashioned way, by a coach who was able to hit the pavement and convince kids to come to his school, beating out the temptations of all those who were looking to exploit the poor kids. Whatever. Coaches have always gotten players by offering them things. Minutes, starting jobs, shot opportunities, a showcase for pro scouts, a clear path to the NBA, you name it. Other either actively or passively offered up perks like money, cars, etc. You don't get kids from warm weather areas to go play in the Northeast, or to leave L.A. to come to some small Midwestern college town, without giving them or someone connected with them, something. No one cares about pipelines to certain cities or school systems that coaches used to stock their teams with all the good players from that area. But what Calipari does is somehow unbearable. Right.....

This is another case of middle aged male paranoia over the loss of the good old days, where everyone knew their place and dared not challenge it. The schools make the deals and the big money, the coaches deliver winning teams for a piece of the action, and the players freely offer up their labor for three to four years after having been sold on the value of staying in college and playing for free when you could be making millions. We got to see dynasties, where teams went to multiple consecutive Final Fours and maybe even multiple championships. We got to see Lew Alcindor graduate from UCLA and be replaced by Bill Walton, Duke and UNC teams with as many as eight future pros, and coaches turned into demigods for all their success. And now that's all gone awry. Coaches like Calipari accept that they are both using people and getting used, and don't hide the facts anymore. And people hate that because it means that can't play innocent anymore; it means that they have to look at the mirror and see that they are a part of the problem and not the solution. It means that that they have to accept that the coaches that they have elevated to the point of being all knowing icons full of virtue and wisdom are cogs in a machine, trying to survive the best they can.

The travesty isn't that Calipari has figured out how to win the one-and-done game; it's that others would rather feel warm and fuzzy as they watch their hoops than for the kids to be empowered to do what's best for themselves.