Monday, May 7, 2012
Coach Cal on Scheduling
There are a number of interesting thoughts and ideas in this statement from Cal. For the record, I am happy with his scheduling philosophy, and I'm glad he has explained it so clearly.
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I would love to know the process by which this came about. Did Coach Calipari simply have a spare 90 minutes to sit down and write and post it himself? Did he work it with some marketing/PR people at UK? Either way, it's really compelling and clear. In fact, like all good persuasive pieces, you find yourself reading all the way to the end almost feeling as though he's simply confirming the opinions you already held.
ReplyDeleteMy guess is that Calipari sat down with some folks at UK and told them basically what he wanted to say. They put together a draft that took care of all structural issues, and he reviewed it to make sure it read exactly the way he wanted.
ReplyDeleteHe's pretty good with words, and some of the statements in there are bolder than what a ghost would be willing to put in someone else's mouth, so my guess is that he had a pretty significant role in the final wordsmithing.
I'm guessing you're right on process.
ReplyDeleteThe guy who ghostwrote a lot of Adolph Rupp's stuff taught at WKU while I was there. It was pretty fun to hear about that.
I should make clear, by the way, that I give Calipari full credit for anything other people write in his name. I find that even when other folks do the drafting, the quality of the final product is driven by the extent to which the person whose name is on the article knows what he wants to say and holds his staff to a high standard of writing.
ReplyDelete"EAGLE BAIT"!!! LOOKS LIKE COACH CAL WILL BE REPLACING INDIANA WITH TENNESSEE TECH. BE CAREFUL FOR WHAT YOU WISH.
ReplyDeleteJohn Clay also objects.
ReplyDeleteOK, so on the one hand, we have John Clay of the LHL -- a paper that is almost totally devoted to the destruction of UK's basketball program. And on the other hand, we have Coach Calipari, who has taken UK to back-to-back Final Fours and won the National Championship. As a Kentucky fan, who am I going to trust?
ReplyDeleteThinking . . . thinking . . .
Ha!
ReplyDeleteThe LHL never quits.
ReplyDeleteOf course, in March 2009 Mark Story of the LHL wrote that UK should keep Billy Gillispie as its coach.
If GM, in a relatively short period of time, emerged from mediocrity and ascended to being the world's No. 1 automaker, pretty much anything that the person behind that turnaround said about "traditional" and "nontraditional" ways of doing business and what it takes to succeed in the contemporary marketplace would be not only applauded but also mimicked across every vaguely comparable industry.
ReplyDeleteFans on the UK message board are pleading with Mitch Barnhart to pull the Herald-Leader's press credentials.
ReplyDeleteThat's completely UK's prerogative, of course. However, the risk there is that the Herald-Leader could turn around and just buy tickets and write about the games however they want. Instead of using quotes from Coach Calipari and the UK players, they could just call, say, Bobby Knight for analysis of each game.
DeleteFor what it's worth, I don't think UK should pull the LHL's credentials -- it would create a national controversy that UK doesn't need. But from my perspective as a news consumer, there's virtually no difference between giving credentials to the LHL and giving credentials to someone reporting for a U of L message board.
DeleteDick Gabriel also objects.
ReplyDeleteThat piece was almost completely incoherent because he didn't seem to understand what Cal means by "non-traditional." Cal doesn't mean "I don't care about UK's traditions." He means "I am trying to win in a new and unique manner." I thought that was obvious, but I guess it's not obvious to everyone.
DeleteOh, and one more time: UK didn't drop IU; they dropped us.
Yeah, John Clay seemed to get tripped up on that, too.
DeleteCoach Crean responds?
DeleteSo they can't play us in Indianapolis because they may be playing Butler or Notre Dame there? Their case is looking worse and worse.
DeleteI take what Crean says the same way I take what Calipari said. They have ideas of how they want their schedules to look and in this case they don't match up. I don't have a problem with that from either side, and as I said before don't care whether UK plays Indiana or not.
Deletedo we get to play our seniors?
ReplyDelete