It appears as if this week's battle of wills between the NCAA and Kentucky is now over.
If you've forgotten, back on February 26th, Kentucky honored John Calipari on his 500th. But since 42 of those wins technically don't exist -- they were vacated due to the scandals involving Marcus Camby at UMass and Derrick Rose at Memphis -- the NCAA took exception to this celebration. The NCAA sent a five page letter to Kentucky saying, essentially, retract that statement or else.
On Thursday afternoon, the Wildcats relented, releasing this statement:
"After consulting with the NCAA, the University of Kentucky has been informed that the honoring of our head men's basketball coach for his 500th career victory on Feb. 26, 2011 was in error and that, henceforth, we will reflect our head men's basketball coach's career record in our media guides, Internet sites and other publications consistent with the NCAA's official records and statistics."
So that's it.
In their letter to Kentucky, the NCAA required Kentucky to receive their approval for the retraction, and since this statement has been released publicly, its safe to assume that they got it. In the end, both sides got what they wanted. Kentucky created a stir by exposing the absurdity of vacating wins while honoring Coach Cal for what was, in all actuality, the 500th win he has orchestrated as a collegiate head coach. The NCAA in turn forced UK to give in to their authority and admit that the NCAA's rules are, in fact, rules.
Problem solved.
Pointless argument ended.
Now we can all move on to the even more pointless practice of learning what college coach called which rising juniors.
The irony of the situation, however, cannot go unnoticed. The NCAA forced Kentucky to vacate their celebration of Coach Cal's 500th win because 42 of those wins were vacated. If that doesn't go to show you just how powerless the NCAA is when it comes to enforcing their rules, then nothing will.
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Kentucky admits that Coach Cal doesn't yet have 500 wins |
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2 comments:
I wonder if the NCAA will require an additional statement from UK, since they never officially apologized in the one released today.
I think this entire situation is a bit silly, but at the same time, did anyone really expect the NCAA to turn a blind eye while UK pretended the wins were never vacated? Of course the NCAA wasn't going to let UK get away with that.
And yes, I'm aware that the NCAA refusing to ignore the fact that UK ignored the NCAA's punishment of essentially ignoring 42 of Cal's wins is something like a quadrupal negative.
They've always turned a blind eye before to how universities list their coach's records. They're actually currently turning a blind eye to the records of many, many other coaches (see Rush The Court's article at http://rushthecourt.net/2011/06/17/ncaa-gets-change-out-of-kentucky-but-will-it-go-after-the-rest/)
I'm admittedly a UK fan, but I've always been annoyed by Big Blue Nation's relentless persecution complex. This time, it really does look like the NCAA went out of its way to poke at Calipari and Kentucky.
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