Saint Calipari and Kentucky – A Match Made in Heaven

The day the purest, cleanest, most unfairly maligned and most successful no-champion head basketball coach in college was tapped to lead the purest, cleanest, most unfairly maligned and most successful basketball program in the history of the sport, we knew that John Calipari and Kentucky was a match made in heaven.

This marriage is a divinely ordained hook up, if you will, that will only produce Final Fours and National Championships year after year, and will only end with ’til death do they part. Not death from NCAA sanctions, or anything silly like that, but an actual death, 40 or so years from now, when Calipari is 90 years old or so.

It will be a death followed by what everyone in Big Blue Nation already knows to be true – that John Calipari will ascend bodily into heaven. Canonization will quickly follow.

That’s Saint Calipari to you.

You see, since Feb. 20, the sports desk here at Sporting Life Arkansas has gotten an amazing view into the mind of Kentucky’s Big Blue Nation. That’s the day we ran a fair but strong column from Jim Harris, the one in which he brought to light St. John Calipari’s comments regarding Archie Goodwin. “I can’t coach you,” Calipari reportedly yelled at Goodwin during the 30-point beat down at the hands of the scrappy Tennessee Volunteers.

But criticism, fair and deserved or not, of St. Calipari is heretical to Big Blue Nation. These heresies must be denounced in the harshest possible terms.

A selection of comments from Big Blue Nation include hateful rants tossed at Jim Harris ranging from “you’re a homer” to “you’re an idiot” to “you’re a terrible writer” and “you’re a douche bag.” Jim Harris is none of those things.

Those are not the comments that tell us much. Those are just typical fan-based rants we have all come to expect.

Receiving emails that tell us to “go (expletive deleted) urself with a aids (expletive deleted)” and end with “PS You Suck!!!!!!” – those things come with the territory, too. We get that. If we wanted civilized discourse, we would make this site about policy and governing how cute kitties and baby goats are.

But the comments that shed light on the mind of the Big Blue Nation are the ones that center on how great a coach John Calipari is, how unfairly he has been treated throughout his career, and how he’s NEVER done ANYTHING wrong.

EVER.

Read them for yourself over on Facebook. You will get a big laugh from many of these after the game you just watched, knowing that Arkansas whipped Kentucky by a final score of 73-60.

We know this Razorback basketball team has had bigger wins this season. There is no argument that beating Florida was bigger, right? Beating Missouri may have been bigger, too, especially when you consider just how poorly coached this Kentucky team looked today.

We guess there is an argument to be made that St. Calipari told the truth after the Tennessee game, when he said he can’t coach some of these players. It seems a statement of the obvious.

For us, there will always be a satisfaction in beating Kentucky, even when it’s a subpar Wildcats team, but there is something even sweeter in beating a Kentucky team with a coach who admits that he has a roster full of top 30 players he cannot coach.

That is Coach St. John Calipari.

Woo Pig Sooie.