By: Bill Doolittle and Russ Brown
Photos By: Matt Johnson, Louisville Athletics & Keith Taylor
RUSS – I know you’re not gonna want to hear this, Bill, because you’re always giving me flak about my love for basketball, but by far -- without question -- the most interesting things going on in Louisville and the state right now involve basketball, as usual. Do you want me to fill you in?
BILL – Roll on, Russ.
RUSS – The Cliff Notes version of what has happened since we talked last time is that Louisville hired Pat Kelsey from College of Charleston to replace Kenny Payne and John Calipari dropped a bombshell by resigning from UK, which quickly named former Cat Mark Pope as his successor. Pope, who played on UK’s 1996 national championship team, has coached an entertaining brand of basketball at BYU for five years. Like Kelsey at UofL, Pope was UK’s third choice after Baylor’s Scott Drew turned down the job and UConn’s Dan Hurley said he wasn’t interested. Many in Big Blue Nation are lukewarm at the choice, to say the least, but Pope got a glowing endorsement from Rick Pitino, so we’ll see how it pans out.
BILL – Well, I think it is interesting Russ, though most of my springtime attention has been focused on the Cincinnati Reds and mowing the grass. But at least you know what you are talking about! What do you think of Pat Kelsey, the new Louisville coach?
RUSS – I’m impressed. I couldn’t have told you who the coach of the College of Charleston was if you asked me. I didn’t know Pat Kelsey from Bill Doolittle when they hired him.
BILL – I’m the coach of the College of Corydon.
RUSS – I guess that makes me the coach of the College of Salem. Kelsey was U of L’s third choice. But to me, he was the second choice, because they weren’t going to get Scott Drew, and they tried to get Dusty May, the coach at Florida Atlantic. I’m going to tell you Pat Kelsey is a lot more impressive than Dusty May.
BILL – Really?
RUSS – By a long shot. I watched Dusty May’s introductory press conference as the new coach at Michigan. Bo-rrring. No personality to speak of. Kelsey – he’s dynamic. I mean he was very, very impressive: energetic, dynamic, personable. And a good coach. He’s had 11 straight winning seasons at Winthrop and Charleston, and that’s not easy to do.
BILL – That is good, Russ. When you coach at schools like that, in mid-major conferences, you have to win to get in the NCAA. None of this stuff like they take those 17-game winners from the big deal conferences because they finished fourth and have a following. Look at the Oakland University Golden Grizzlies. You think they got in the NCAA because of the prestige of the Horizon League? No, they won their way in. And knocked off Kentucky.
But in the meantime, we have to talk about NIL – the benefits players can receive from licensing their Name, Image and Likeness (NIL). What do you think, Russ?
RUSS – Well, there’s no question that NIL is driving college athletics, especially football and basketball, and even to an extent some of the lesser sports. There is very little known about it.
I don’t know all the details, but Utah recently passed a state law dealing with NIL. The basic premise is that all the state universities in the Beehive State have to account for where the money is coming from, how much and who gets it. In other words, open records, which is what this should be. I wish Kentucky would pass a similar law. Nobody knows the names of most of UofL’s 502Circle collective donors, although the Kueber brothers of Planet Fitness fame promised to match donations up to one million. The main mystery is how much individual sports are benefitting and which players are profiting the most.
BILL– I think the most interesting part is WHO is the person who pays the NIL money to sign top players. I don’t mean who are the rich donors who stock the NIL bank accounts. What I want to know is who is the actual person, the title of the person, who signs the prospects. Most people think that’s the coach. But I wonder.
Seems like it would be a great spot for a super salesman. Not some assistant associate athletic department person, but a true salesman. The guy who gets the player to “ink pact,” as they say. The Closer.
The coaches at Louisville – Pat Kelsey, Jeff Brohm, Jeff Walz, Dan McDonnell, Dani Busboom Kelly and others – could probably use the services of, say, the No. 1 salesman at the top car dealership in town. Or a finance whiz who sells million-dollar bonds to billionaires. Like, say you had the top salesman at Sam Swope Pontiac. The coach is hoping to sign a star running back, and the bidding is going on. When the Florida State guy says he has to step away for a minute to “talk with my general manager,” our guy says, “Hey, you know what you really need besides all this money? I got this cherry red GTO parked right out here at the curb. Here’s the keys and we can go for a drive right now.”
Nobody walks away!
RUSS – Maybe. But I think that with most of these kids, it’s going to come down to who’s paying the most. I mean, you can throw in all the bells and whistles you want but if you can’t match or beat the player’s best offer from another school, you’re probably not going to get him or her. I also think that kids want to hear mostly from the coaches they’re going to be playing for because they’re never going to see this “salesperson” again.
BILL – Perhaps I am living in another time.
RUSS – It has almost become an employer/employee relationship. We sportswriters have always joked about so-called student athletes, as the NCAA insists on calling the hired guns. Many are simply athletes and classwork is just a necessary evil. And with basically free agency now due to the transfer portal, it’s more that way than ever. Even before the recent changes, however, you very rarely heard an athlete proclaim that he is enrolling at UofL, for instance, because it has a great business school or medical school. And I am still waiting for the first athlete to say he chose a school because he really liked the biology professor (or whomever) he met during his visit.
BILL – Before we forget, what about John Calipari? How about him saying sayonara to the Big Blue.
RUSS – The blockbuster, or the bombshell since we last published was Calipari resigning at Kentucky and then almost immediately going to Tyson University, which is also Arkansas. The Tyson chicken people threw a bunch of money at him, instead of eggs. I don’t know, but I think he’s probably making about as much as he was at Kentucky.
BILL – It’s a fresh start for him, and the end maybe of the one-and-done thing at Kentucky.
RUSS – Calipari wasn’t winning, that was the bottom line. They have won one tournament game since 2017. As many as Louisville won since 2017. One game each.
BILL – What about the new coach, Mark Pope?
RUSS – Did you ever see BYU play? They’re real interesting to watch; pass the ball – a lot of passing – shoot the three, scoring a lot. Very good offensive team. Probably a little better defensive team than Indiana State, but that’s who I would compare ‘em to. And of course, the Cat fans don’t like Pope. They thought they should get Rick Pitino or Billy Donovan or Jay Wright.
BILL– Or Adolph Rupp. He’s the only Kentucky coach to ever win more than one championship.
RUSS – I think Pope is going to be good. But to get back to Calipari. I think he recognized that that program was broken and he wasn’t going to be able to fix it. So he was going to leave. And I think the relationship with (athletic director) Mitch Barnhardt was ruptured. I think there’s a lot more to that that we don’t know as far as the reasons he left and how that all came about.
BILL – It all reminds me of a horse we had one time named Better for All. He was a beautiful horse, but he wouldn’t win. So we put him in a sale up in Ohio. He was a really good-looking gray horse and Jackie Gray, the trainer, had this stuff he said he got from the “high-tails” (show horses) that he rubbed all over the horse and when he went into the ring he looked like a million dollars. He didn’t bring that much, but he did sell for $1 thousand more than the claiming price he wasn’t winning for. Just like basketball. The horse, the people, everybody needed a change … Better for All.
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