Steve Kelley of the Seattle Times wrote a scathing column about John Calipari’s shenanigans with regard to UW commit Terrence Jones.
Take Friday, for instance, when Terrence Jones and his best friend Terrence Ross announced at a joint news conference, held at their Portland high school, they were going to play basketball for Washington.
It was a day for celebration. It was their day, nobody else’s.
Then after their announcements, according to reports, Jones showed enough class to call Kentucky coach John Calipari to tell Calipari he was going to Washington.
Calipari reacted like a coach who hadn’t heard the final buzzer. Jones still hadn’t signed his letter of intent. To Calipari, that meant the game was still on, and there’s no quit in Coach Cal.
Who knows what Calipari told Jones? Who knows what suggestions and promises were made? Who knows what game-changing strategy Calipari was employing?
Temporarily, at least, Jones postponed his decision to go to UW. Instead of allowing Friday’s news conference to be celebratory, Calipari cloaked it in confusion.
Maybe nothing Calipari said to Jones was against NCAA rules, but with Calipari there is always room for suspicion.
Calipari does a great job with recruiting, but who knows if it’s on the level. Everywhere he goes, scandal follows. There was the UMass Marcus Camby incident, the Derrick Rose SAT scandal and most recently, a suspicious reply (“Yea”) from Marcus Teague when a fake John Calipari told him via Facebook to make sure that “nobody ever know any of the details” of “what goes on behind the scenes” during Teague’s recruiting trip to Kentucky.
Then there’s Jones, who already verbally committed to Washington, yet Calipari is sill looking like a glorified used car salesman, putting on the hard sell.
Photo from fOTOGLIF
