Coach Cal And The Problem With NCAA Rules

by Stuart Shapiro

To the surprise of no one, John Calipari and the Kentucky Wildcats won the NCAA college basketball championship.  Calipari did it with a team largely of freshmen and sophomores who will now leave college and pursue college careers.  Calipari has come in for a lot of criticism for just recruiting top players and effectively telling them that they can leave as soon as they are eligible for the National Basketball Association (after one year of college).  This seemingly violates the NCAA’s myth of the “scholar-athlete.”  Like Joe Nocera, I don’t see the problem.

Calipari, complained Emmert, was “throwing away the collegiate model.” But, he’s not, because in the big-money sports of football and men’s basketball, the collegiate model is a fiction. Rather, Calipari is dispensing with the hypocrisy that everyone else goes along with

Calipari, who has been accused of skirting the rules before is simply exploiting them now.  And he shows a fundamental truth, someone will eventually always find a way around the rules, no matter how tight you make them.

By: Stuart Shapiro

Stuart is a professor and the Director of the Public Policy
program at the Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers
University. He teaches economics and cost-benefit analysis and studies
regulation in the United States at both the federal and state levels.
Prior to coming to Rutgers, Stuart worked for five years at the Office
of Management and Budget in Washington under Presidents Clinton and
George W. Bush.