Straw Poll: How Many Think Cal Is What Draws Recruits to UK?
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Cal arguably knocked it farther out of the park at UMass when he brought that level of talent there (including Marcus Camby) than what he has done at UK.
Cal bringing the level of talent he brought to then moribund Memphis was arguably knocking it farther out than what he has done at UK.
But the point is not how far he has knocked it out of the park relative to his past stays.
The point is that he has 10 Mickey Ds at UK and no one at any other elite program does.
And Snap Shot, while it is a great innovation, does not explain the 10 Mickey Ds already at UK.
To reiterate, unless i have misunderstood you and you are arguing that Cal and UK have been using Snap Shot the last few years recruiting, Snap Shot absolutely is NOT one single reason why Cal and UK ALREADY has 10 Mickey Ds on this year’s roster.
But it is an indication of his, or at least his program’s, willingness to try innovate.
Rock Chalk!
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If the pay is good, I’m in!
Seriously, though, there are quite a few aliases here that would strongly disagree with you. And I’m not even entirely sure some of them indicate different persons all the time.
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Yeeeeeee HAWWWWWWWWW!
ITS GAME DAY!!!
Bring us the head of the Kentucky Wildcat mascot pithed on a spike, afterwards, so that @drgnslayr can at least get a hint of what Meso-American Ball once was like!!!
(Note: just kidding, UK fans. I really like animals and always want the best for your critter.)
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@jaybate-1.0 What I’m saying is that Cal has more resources at UK, and it’s impossible to pick one reason to explain. SnapCHAT is a new trend for young people right now (and if you can buy their stock, I highly recommend you do). Snapchat is a new thing though. It’s been really popular for about a year or two. It’s not a big deal. It’s just a trend with young people. Like I said, long video series are released every weekend. This is common for large festivals like Austin City Limits, or the Kentucky Derby, or College Gameday. For UK to do it for their Big Blue Madness was huge. NO OTHER CBB TEAM DID THAT. It was brilliant on their part. Every high school and college kid has snapchat and saw that video. For the topic of this debate, I’m saying that all high level recruits saw that video. It wasn’t something that was just sent to them. It was sent to every single person that has snapchat (OVER 100 MILLION PEOPLE!) It doesn’t matter your interests. I got it too just because I have the app.
This move is representative of the REASONS why Cal gets these recruits. It again, is not just one thing. It’s several. UK is also currently using snapchat to send players videos and pictures (in this context, a snap is like a personal video text message or picture), which the NCAA allows.
Then again, if you don’t know what snapchat is, it’s kind of hard to explain the significance of this whole thing and how it works.
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@MoonwalkMafia I was just giving you a good natured ribbing because you mentioned Late Night being held during an ALCS game in the same breath as you did the Fall Break, whilst stating those as contrasting factors to UK’s exciting event. I didn’t fail to see the crux of your point, I just failed to comment on it.
Regarding the Fall Break though, it is my understanding that Late Night is a set date. At midnight it marks the date that teams are allowed by the NCAA to officially hold practices. So if I am correct, the date of Late Night cannot be changed, in which case your issue is that the school scheduled it’s fall break at the wrong time? If this is the case, the person(s) who “dropped the ball” would most certainly be someone outside the athletic department, let alone the basketball program.
At any rate, I myself did not attend, but one of my brothers did and he also stated that compared to years past it was rather dead.
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Cal is very good about keeping up with trends. That has always been what has helped him with recruiting. He can walk into a recruit’s home and talk to them about their game, their academics, the university, the latest hip hop video, new social trends, etc.
Not only that, he’s able to do that without seeming like the out of touch old guy trying to talk about that new thing they don’t really know about. That matters to people.
It also matters to these top guys that of Cal’s most recent crop of recruits, Rose, Wall, and Cousins all have max deals in the NBA. Self doesn’t have a single KU player that he has coached on a max deal. That makes a huge difference.
Maybe in a couple of years Wiggins or Embiid will have signed a max extension, but for right now KU doesn’t have a guy like that. Pierce is still the most successful KU player of the last 20 years from a professional standpoint, and he’s in the twilight of his career. The next most successful NBA players from KU are Collison, Gooden and Hinrich in some order. After that, it’s probably Darrell Arthur. Great college players, all. But from a pro standpoint, other than Pierce, KU doesn’t have a single perennial all star, none from the Bill Self era.
That’s an issue. This is why KU needs to land either Jaylen Brown or Malik Newman. They are dynamic players that can succeed at the college level and beyond. That matters to the elite recruits because those guys are the ones that most likely will someday become an NBA star. Very few future NBA stars are ranked outside the top 25 as high school seniors. For that specific reason, that subset of players - elite high school prospects - are concerned with who can move them to the highest level - the maximum salary player. Calipari has done that consistently. It’s likely Anthony Davis will join the previous group among max players next summer. KU is at least a couple years away from having a max level player. That matters to that subset moreso than any other subset because these are the guys that can seriously (and even realistically) envision that in their future.
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You are preaching to the choir about the benefits of snap shot, so stop already. I am the one that was giving you strokes for it. Take praise gracefully.
Now, let’s go with this again.
I like the idea of aggregate basketball resources being a possible explanation. Money, money, money! Infrastructure. IT. Etc. Etc. All inclusivo!
It poses a problem of how to account for everything, so we will just have to talk in the aggregate and in generalities.
Fine.
What you are proposing is “The Cal Has More Aggregate Basketball Resources at UK Hypothesis”.
Fine, let’s not get defensive. Let’s go with it.
Why was Cal able to out recruit Bill Self for Derek Rose at Memphis, when Self had more aggregate resources at KU than Cal had at Memphis?
Why was Cal arguably able to out recruit some elite basketball programs that had greater aggregate basketball resources than Memphis had?
Why for so many years were North Carolina (Nike), and Duke which have just as many aggregate resources as UK, able to attract about the same number of Mickey Ds and in the gravy years of UNC fewer?
KU has enormous basketball resources.
Michigan State under Izzo has enormous basketball resources.
Hell, John Bellein at UM has enormous basketball resources.
Tom Crean at Indiana has staggering basketball resources.
Oh, my gosh, here is a great example. Louisville in the same state after Crum and Pitino coaching at Louisville have fabulous basketball resources. Louisville’s latest adidas contract actually dwarfs UK’s Nike contract of late.
I just don’t see how the sum total of “aggregate basketball resources” can plausibly come close to explaining why John Calipari has 10 Mickey D’s and the other schools and coaches with enormous basketball resources have half that many.
Can we argue plausibly that UK having less than twice the aggregate basketball resources that all of the other top programs possess should come up with twice the Mickey Ds?
I don’t see how to do that, at least if aggregate basketball resources are the drive of Cal’s Mickey Ds.
I mean that would violate logic, wouldn’t it?
You would at the very least have to come up with another hypothesis explaining why there is a conspicuously nonlinear relationship between aggregate basketball resources and Mickey D’s. And this is all BEFORE snapshot and even independent if one had any effective notion of what snap shot were?
No, I’m afraid aggregate basketball resources, which I admit to have had some hope for, does not adequately explain why Cal has 10 Mickey Ds and the other top programs have far fewer.
The quest for why Cal has 10 Mickey Ds continues.
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As I recall, Xavier Henry and both of the Morris twins signed to play with Memphis when Cal was there. After Cal left and went to Kentucky, they came to Kansas. I’ve always wondered if anyone ever bothered to ask them what attracted them to play for Cal at a less prestigious school that didn’t play as much top-notch competition and was not on national television as often as KU, UK, UNC, UCLA, etc.
I really have my doubts he’s cheating, but he’s doing something right.
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@icthawkfan316 I gotcha, buddy. That can’t be true since so many other schools have their “late night” at different times. Kentucky and MSU had theirs a week after KU, so… I really don’t know, but I just can’t see that being the case.
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In previous years men’s basketball teams were not permitted to practice prior to the Friday closest to October 15. In 1971, Coach Lefty Driessel at Maryland started a celebration that included running in the track at the stadium right after midnight on the first day of practice. In 1982, Kentucky started what they called “Midnight Madness” and in 1985 under Larry Brown, KU started “Late Night at the Phog.” These tradition have stayed in place even after the practice rules have changed and some.like KU, chose to keep it as close as the traditional and original date, except with an earlier starting time; others, such as Kentucky, have opted for having theirs later when they can have the greatest impact and more importantly, a later visit by top prospects.
There you have it, tradition versus marketing.
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Ah, great to hear you back at the hypothesis positing and testing bench. This is quite thought provoking and fun.
Let’s see, if I understand you correctly this time out, you are posing a couple of hypotheses.
First there is the “Cal is better at keeping up with trends” hypothesis.
Second, there is “The Max Deals” Hypothesis.
Of the two, the scientist in me vastly prefers the second hypothesis, because it is rather more empirically verifiable.
But to minimize my bias and in the interest of systematic inquiry and love of our Jayhawks, I will test both.
Let’s see, lets go with the “Cal is authentically better at keeping up with trends” hypothesis.
This one is very, very, very tough to test. Personal trendiness is very elusive to rank or quantify.
I mean, I can say Cal appears trendier than Coach K, but I am not sure how I can say he is trendier than Kurtis Townsend, who recruits for KU. And just between you and me, Cal seems like a completely unathletic, relatively un-with-it little dweeb compared to Self, when I see them both letting their hair down. And, frankly, Bill seems a helluva lot more fun to be around off the floor. But maybe Cal is trendier on the floor.
But really, neither of these guys are exactly Denzel Washington, or Brad Pitt, in terms of outward personal trendiness, are they?
How about Cal versus Kevin Ollie? Why do I have a feeling that Cal is not quite as cool as Kevin? Why do I have a feeling that Cal does not quite grasp the Urban Dictionary quite as well as Kevin Ollie? Why do I get the feeling that maybe Kevin understands and speaks the language of the hood urban and a leeeeeeeeeetle flipping better than Cal? But Kevin flashing a ring and his trendiness both did not net 5 Mickey D’s after last season and is not leading Cal this season.
So: I don’t really think Trendiness alone, or even decisively, or even to considerable degree is driving this. For one reason, if trendiness, especially authentic trendiness were the key to recruiting, then basketball coaches would long, long, long ago have been naturally selected toward incredibly trendy fellows and as we look around the coaching ranks, while there are certainly a lot of men that stay younger than they might otherwise stay, while coaching, we are not seeing Denzel and George Clooney attracted to the coaching ranks in significant numbers.
But due to the degree of difficulty related to measurement of the authentic trendiness hypothesis, I must not dismiss it out of hand. I must give it another try.
If Cal were authentically better at keeping up with trends, we would probably expect to find a lot of players posting about how impressed they were with Cal’s knowledge of contemporary music, movies, clothing, designers, cars and other examples of youth culture, especially of the youth sub cultures that these players come from.
I googled the following: “What do players think of John Calipari?” Many links came up, but the first ten pages of links down I found not one link that mentioned about how trendy Cal’s knowledge was, of how great his knowledge of youth and popular culture.
But I did find one really remarkable quote about what makes Calipari such a successful recruiter that really had nothing to do with Cal’s trendiness, or lack there of. And I really think it is worth calling your attention to. This was a
“Calipari’s honesty with his players transcends his own ambition, and by doing so, he opens up a huge pipeline to other players with NBA aspirations. Players no longer need William Wesley to tell them that Coach Calipari will deal fairly with them. His reputation is already known, already understood.”
http://www.aseaofblue.com/2010/6/23/1531891/kentucky-basketball-john-caliparis
What particularly interests me about this quote and article includes;
1.) it makes no mention of Cal’s trendiness;
2.) it says that the most important attraction of Calipari is that players trust that he will not hold them back from going pro; and
3.) players used to need William Wesley to convince them that Coach Cal would not hold them back.
In attempting to downgrade the important of World Wide Wes to Calipari’s attraction to players, the obviously sympathetic article to Calipari, calls attention to notion that Cal’s attraction to players is a kind of trust transferred to Cal by World Wide Wes.
So: the obvious question is: why did players trust World Wide Wes, and why do they no longer need to trust World Wide Wes, but can instead trust John Vincent Calipari?
But I digress.
Oops, let me digress just one bit further on this. I found an even older story about Cal written when he first came to Memphis that goes into Cal’s personality traits and into his family and so on. It portrays a man who is decidedly NOT trendy by Cal’s own self-description.
http://www.memphisflyer.com/memphis/john-calipari-the-man-of-the-hour/Content?oid=1116753
So let’s consider “The Max Deals” hypothesis, which I intuitively have a lot of hope for. It seems to lend itself to empirics, or at least the hope for them with some digging.
The nub of the max deals hypothesis is that Rose, Wall, and Cousins, plus Walker as a bun in the oven soon to be baked, constitute a series of high profile players with such huge NBA contracts that Cal can point to and say something like, “See you can be rich like that if you play for me.”
I like this hypothesis, because it even attempts to account for KU’s Andrew Wiggins and Joel Embiid going 1 and 3 last season, and Self not getting 5 Mickey Ds afterwards, by saying that see, here, KU with those two and Ben Mac and so on could be on the same track a few years down the road. This has the incentive of hope.
But I see a problem here. Do Rose, Wall and Cousins really overwhelm the Max Deals of Duke, Syracuse, UConn, UNC, Louisville, Ohio State, Michigan, Michigan State, in each case by a factor of 10 Mickey Ds to significantly less than 5 Mickey Ds; that is by a factor of TWO?
Now I think the Max Deal Hypothesis maybe holds against KU, But I am not sure that if one goes back starting Rose in 2008, or say rounding it to 2005, if Cal’s MAX Deals exceed by a factor of two the max deals of say, Duke, or UNC, or Uconn, or Syracuse, or even UCLA and Ohio State.
I have to plead some inadequacy of memory here and request that you, or someone else, quantify that Cal’s Max Deals exceed by a factor of two all of the Max deals of these other programs.
But I will tell you this.
If you are right about Cal’s Max deals exceeding all these other programs Max deals, then I think that if we combine that with Cal no longer needing World Wide Wes to assure them that he will not hold them back, then we may be on to something and it may be worth forming a new hypothesis including both.
Rock Chalk!
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Bravo!!!
I think that is one of the most stimulating ideas yet.
Running out of time right now, but hold that thought!!!
Let’s hope someone comes forward with some link or something that might reveal some answers to that.
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“Bring us the head of the Kentucky Wildcat mascot pithed on a spike, afterwards, so that @drgnslayr can at least get a hint of what Meso-American Ball once was like!!!”
…and throw the carcass over the temple’s edge into the sea while asking for mercy from the Sun God!
I’m cool with preserving life, whether from beast or man… so we can just take the mascot’s costume and perform the ritual.
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Damn, I was just leaving and then you had to go and make me split a gut with throwing the carcass!!!
Rock Chalk!!!
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@MoonwalkMafia “You both did not even look at the crux of my point as well…”. Oh, i got your point, loud and clear. You call for someone to be fired because we only had 14,000 people for Late Night. Oh, the horrors!!! Sorry you choose to look at the glass half full. When I went to KU, there was no such thing as Late Night. So, I see a nearly organic KU experience that has blossomed where real fans get to meet our new team, not some phony baloney rapper having to be jettisoned into our field house because you couldn’t fill your arena even half way otherwise. As a university with a fan base that is flat huge, I don’t think we need to be insecure about the way we do things here. Now maybe if we were a lesser program that wasn’t sure of itself, we might need to copy others, so we could “keep up with the Jones”. Well, guess what? WE’RE THE JONES…
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“This move is representative of the REASONS why Cal gets these recruits.”
Hey… thanks for your post! This thread is about finding out what Calipari does to snare the high amount of top tier recruits. I agree with you that there are several reasons… and even Snapchat could be one of them, if for no other reason than conducting activities that HS students relate to. That can have an impact, and maybe it is just a sign of other things they do to relate to HS students.
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Which begs the question…do we really want a player whose defining criteria is a Snapchat post? I mean…really?
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@JayHawkFanToo we always thought the guy that try’s to be cool, is far from it! The guy who is cool, just is! Having drake hang out w/you doesn’t make you cool. But keep trying!
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@jaybate-1.0 I vote yes, but with a caveat. He has an unfair advantage somewhere and/or he is playing the system illegally. Cant wait to see Kensucky get stung by a scandal like UNC did. Which Im not happy about Btw.
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Very funny, given this thread. But initial word is that Oubre is starting. Self is learning from Cal, apparently (if true). Can’t get on the court vs. UCSB, but now starting? Wow.
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@HighEliteMajor maybe he’s been sandbagging him??
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@KUSTEVE No. You absolutely, abysmally, and embarrassingly missed my point. My whole post was about snapchat. You know, in response to the entire point of this post…? Not Late Night.
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@MoonwalkMafia So, Snapchat was the reason you called for the Late Night organizer to be fired? Maybe it would help if you went back, and read what you wrote, so you can keep your stories straight.
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“Which begs the question…do we really want a player whose defining criteria is a Snapchat post? I mean…really?”
Didn’t think I would ever say this… but after the raping last night… YES!
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@KUSTEVE My entire post was about how UK is able to relate to younger people in a truly impressive way. Their appeal to high level recruits is incredible. The videos that recruits saw on snapchat of BBM were very impressive. That’s what they saw. It’s not about comparing the two events, it’s about figuring out how and why UK is such a lock when it comes to getting high-level talent. No need to be internet tough guy over this with your “mouthing off” comment.
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@MoonwalkMafia You are attacking me because you said several foolish things that were called on the carpet by a slew of posters, including me. I understand from an ingrate’s perspective like yours, your narcissism won’t allow you admit you were wrong. It’s the burden of ignorance all arrogant people must carry. This will be my last post to you, as I don’t see any ability to carry on an adult conversation with someone who simply needs to grow up. Good luck in your quest for trying to be the “smartest guy in the room”. Hope it works out for you.
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@KUSTEVE You have done nothing to show you are an adult. I’m impressed with your petulance. Still don’t really understand what you’re so mad about. But then again I’ve seen you act like this towards a lot of posters. Guess it’s just my turn.
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@justanotherfan I’m sorry for just now coming across this. But yes. That is exactly what I’m saying. Looking for an academic argument in this is pointless. We’re talking about kids here. Kids with short attention spans. I mean, to go with your point, think of how many K-State fans think that KSU has always been a football powerhouse. They don’t know that KSU almost did away with football because they were so bad. It’s all about capturing that short attention span.
And you’re absolutely right about Late Night. It’s about tradition. When they show the video of Russel Robinson tearing up on senior night…gets me every time. But what’s that mean to a high school kid from California? Very little.
