Should College Coaches Be Held Responsible for Just About Everything?

Perhaps he is not the most conventional moral arbiter, but there is a vaguely refreshing don't-give-a-shit flourish to the way University of Kentucky men's basketball coach John Calipari addresses the media these days. Nearly three decades into his coaching career, he has embraced his perception as a mercenary, and part of this role is to take subtle digs at both the NCAA and the coaches who judge him for manipulating a college athletic system that is riddled with inherent flaws.

In May, Calipari seemingly took an indirect shot at Duke's perceived self-righteousness; just this week, on Mike Lupica's radio show, he seemingly found a way to condemn the recent scandals at North Carolina and Louisville.

"All I can tell you is this: if it happens on your campus, and it happens with your assistants and those people, you probably have a pretty good idea of what's going on," Calipari told Lupica when asked the extent to which coaches should be blamed for the scandals that occur on their watch. "If it happens back in their hometown, it happens back with their family or other ways, there's no way you can know. You just don't know. So all I would say is most coaches have an idea if it happened on their campus. You might not be the first to know about it, but you eventually hear about it."

Was this at least partially self-serving way to parse things? Of course it was, given that the scandals at Louisville (plying recruits with prostitutes) and North Carolina (massive academic fraud) took place on campus, and those that plagued Calipari at UMass and Memphis both occurred off it. But as with many things Calpari says these days, it raised a larger question: How responsible is a coach for those improprieties that occur on his watch? And since Calipari also mentioned that the way we see things is often dependent on "who the coach is," how much does our perception of a coach play into the way these breaches of the rules are viewed?

This is a discussion that goes back decades, of course, as football and basketball coaches have gained a disturbing amount of stature, money, and power on campus in the course of the 20th century. It is a question that arose again this week, amid the odd and disturbing groundswell of support for Baylor football coach Art Briles amid the sexual assault scandal that roiled Baylor under his watch. Under Calipari's guidelines, Briles has little excuse for the cover-up that seemingly occurred at the university.

While there is no proof that Calipari has ever presided over anything nearly as horrifying as what took place at Baylor, there is one apparent commonality between what took place there and between Calipari's overarching view of college athletics: just as Briles tried to recruit talented reclamation projects, Calipari has chased basketball ability above all else. He views the college element of college athletics as a means to an end; as he told Lupica later in that same podcast, his primary concern as a coach is, "Am I able to help these kids?"

That certainly sounds noble, but it's the same rationale that has brought down many coaches over the years: if you go too far to help kids who may be complicit in heinous acts, as Briles is accused of doing, then you deserve to be condemned.

But what about more morally ambiguous cases, those that center around NCAA rules violations like the ones that have plagued Calipari in the past?

Up to now, Calipari has been able to get past any problems, in part, I think, because he is so frank about his intentions. You know what you're getting with Calipari; as a recruit being chased by both Duke and Kentucky recently said, "Kentucky's pitch was just the NBA thing. Duke's pitch was if you come to Duke, you're going to be set for life. It's more than just basketball. (John Calipari's) pitch was he gets guys ready for the next level. Look at the numbers: it shows. It's the best place for you if you want to make it to the NBA."

Does that absolve Calipari of blame, then, for any scandal, since he doesn't really buy into the often-hypocritical argument that underpins the very notion of amateurism? Not really. But perhaps it matters for some scandals, for ones that are essentially crimes against an arguably exploitative system. It does make it easier for Calipari to claim that everything he's doing is in the best interest of the kids he's recruiting to his program, rather than in the best interest of the system itself. It makes it easier for him to say, I was just trying to improve these kids' lives.

And maybe there's some legitimate weight to that argument, just as there's value in what Calipari said the other day beyond the subtle digs at Louisville and North Carolina. Maybe there should be more balance in the way we view these things, and maybe we should not immediately condemn a coach who—in certain circumstances—may truly have had little to no idea about the transgressions occurring under his watch.

We want coaches to win, sure. Increasingly, though, we also want and expect them to ensure that their athletes succeed in the classroom (do we blame chemistry professors when the football team finishes 3-8?); that they handle sexual assault charges and cases with an appropriate mix of fairness, compassion and discipline (never mind that university administrations do a notoriously poor job of this, and that even trained law enforcement professionals often stumble badly); that they even know the balances in athletes' personal checking accounts (do you know your own balance right now?).

Remember: these are men and women whose lifelong expertise is in drag routes and hammer screens, and their main job is helping kids become experts as well. Are we perhaps asking too much?

Of course, it goes the other way, too. As coaches consolidate their own fiefdoms on campus, as they grow more and more rich and powerful and demand more leeway to spy on their own players' lives, they may often be forced to accept the notion that they are responsible even for those things they "just don't know." Captains go down with ships; today's figurehead is tomorrow's sacrificial lamb. Maybe it's not always fair, but it's part of the job, and Calipari essentially admitted that later in the same interview with Lupica, as he expanded on the notion that he was coaching to "help these kids."

"I don't need the money," he said. "But I do take it."

Want to read more stories like this from VICE Sports? Subscribe to our daily newsletter.