…he will follow the money……which is on its way to KY

Kurt Bohls has an article about the toughest current jobs in college sports. He has Kentucky basketball #1 and Texas football #10 and includes a decent synopsis for why they are where they are. Brown has been successful enough to avoid overwhelming pressure to change much less be on the hotseat. Even though OU has more conference titles, their current BCS losing streak and what will hopefully be a continuing and long string of losses to us, has him closer to the hot seat than Mack.

I think Kentucky really is potentially a more difficult job since their prestige drops a little every year non-basketball hotbed schools like Texas, Florida, and Ohio State build top-10 programs. Kentucky doesn’t produce in-state recruits at a high number and street agents and runners now funnel kids all over the place looking for their next payday. I think Kentucky’s fans are going to be disappointed for quite some time even if Calipari and Wes continue to buy up top recruits. Winning the NCAA tournament is one of the hardest things in sports and winning it multiple times is just that much more difficult in these times of one-and-done recruits and the fact that basketball is no longer just regionally popular.

Agree 100%.

I wasn’t saying Calipari should not go just because Memphis is better now. I was doing more of “brainstorming” the reasons why or why not he should go. If he wants to go somewhere where there’s great tradition and build it back up, then sure, go ahead. If he wants to have another chance to win the national title in the immediate future (like next year), it’s probably better to stay in the short-term. It’s pretty much what kind of challenge he wants. I’m actually expecting he will build up Kentucky basketball in a short time, although his first one or two years may not yield the grand results he could get at Memphis.

As far as Kentucky, while I agree there are unreasonable Texas fans, I don’t think it was on the level of Kentucky. People get mad at Mack for not winning the big prizes (or used to get mad at him) because he was fielding teams capable of doing so. For Kentucky, I would say they didn’t have the players to go deep in the tournament, so expecting that would be very unreasonable. Tubby Smith got chewed up and spit out, and while he certainly should have recruited better, it’s not like he’s an awful coach. As Rickyspub says, Mack Brown has never been in any real danger of being fired. Never. That’s a far cry from what has happened in Kentucky. Thus, it’s NOT on par. Furthermore, Texas is a more natural place to recruit football talent than Kentucky is for basketball talent, as Kentucky has to do more recruiting nationally while Texas can pick and choose at home. Of course, since Calipari has proven to be a good recruiter, this may not matter much, but as for the job itself it does give it more difficulty.

Lastly, I did not deny that Kentucky is a great prestige job. Of course it is. That doesn’t make it “enviable.” After all, being the Dallas Cowboy head coach is very prestigious, but it comes with a mountain of baggage (not to mention Jerry Jones), and some will say that makes it unenviable. But for those select few who are up for the challenge, then sure, go for it. Rick Barnes didn’t want the Kentucky job and elected to stay at Texas, since he already had a good thing and didn’t want to deal with all the things that would come with going to UK. Calipari seems more savvy than Gillespie, so I expect to him to handle the fans better and have more success, but time will tell if he made the right decision to leave Memphis. After all, Pitino took one of the great prestige jobs in the NBA, coaching the Celtics, and it turned out he should have stayed put at Kentucky.