Cal in the ACC?
One winter day in 2003, Memphis coach John Calipari called me and asked if I was going to be on that morning's Conference USA media teleconference. I told him I hadn't been planning on it. He said I should go on and ask him about the quality of the league's officials, an innocuous question that dripped with possibilities since Memphis was about to play a huge game at Louisville.
In terms of journalistic ethics, I wasn't sure where a coach planting a loaded question ranked, but I brushed it aside because I knew he was plotting something deliciously diabolical.
So I asked. Cal answered that he was excited that a "Final Four(-caliber) crew" was calling the game, men so good at their job they wouldn't be intimidated by Rick Pitino and allow Calipari's team to get mauled under the basket.
"We're not going to have all the hand checking and pushing and shoving," he said. "There's just not going to be shoving in the post for a rebound."
A few minutes later Pitino was asked about Cal's loaded comments. Pitino shot back, Cal later returned volley and by tipoff there was all sorts of bickering, all sorts of big headlines in the papers. Then Memphis, in just the closely called game that favored the Tigers, won at Freedom Hall.
That tale, the quintessential John Calipari story, is why he is the perfect coach for North Carolina State, and the Wolfpack know it. It is not because of who he would make happy (State alums), but who he would drive nuts, namely Mike Krzyzewski and Roy Williams.
That has to be what State really wants – to be relevant, to be feared, to matter again to its local rivals, Duke and North Carolina. To get that, it has to have a coach who will get under the Big Two's skin, wage war in the media, steal recruits and road wins, basically give the Wolfpack both the bark and the bite they've lacked.
If it were just about having a winning basketball team that was led by a classy coach who graduated players and steered clear of NCAA investigators, then Herb Sendek still would be in Raleigh.
No, State is going all in, and if it can lure Calipari out of Memphis, Tobacco Road instantly will get a whole heck of a lot more interesting. College basketball, too.
Calipari would win big at State. He wins big everywhere. An exceptional practice coach and recruiter, he built up Massachusetts, actually got the New Jersey Nets going for the first time in decades and returned Memphis to the national elite.
He'd do the same with the Pack.
There is a false assumption that State can't win because of its proximity to Duke and Carolina. But the three schools are very different and will recruit, often, from three different talent pools. There are overlaps, sure, but not as many as you'd think.
Duke and State almost never knock heads. Carolina and the Pack could, but only on some in-state prospects. Cal will get his guys, tough kids from around the country, some of them arriving with baggage that he quickly will explain away. He would get the kind of exciting, highly touted prospects that State alums could brag about all summer around 19th holes in North Carolina.
While that shouldn't matter, the reality is that in a part of the country where college hoops is a 365-day-a-year affair, it does.
Give John Calipari the ACC, an NBA-quality arena, a passionate fan base, a strong tradition and a terrific school to recruit with (not to mention the new NBA age minimum), and talent won't be the problem.
No, he wouldn't overnight make State a better program than Duke or Carolina because that is nearly impossible. But State shouldn't have to take a back seat to anyone, and he would remind everyone of that.
And that is where the planted press conference questions, the not-so-subtle digs in the newspaper and the drop-the-gloves fighting mentality would kick in.
In an era when coaches seem to come right off the production line, a bunch of boring clones afraid of upsetting the apple cart, Calipari is a throwback to the old-school days of feuds, rivalries and attention-grabbing antics. You don't have to like him or what he does to appreciate that he is great theater in a day and age when the game needs more, not less, of it.
John Calipari loves drama. He lives it, he breathes it, he can't function without it. It is why he would leave Memphis, where he can win forever. Conference USA no longer offers a foil, a rival or much attention.
Cal absolutely is at his best when he is battling someone over something. He will look around the block, find the biggest guy and start jabbing his finger in the guy's chest. At UMass it was John Chaney and Jim Calhoun. In Memphis it was Rick Pitino and Bob Huggins.
"You just pull that little cord, and the same [comments] come out," a flustered Pitino said after one of their many dust-ups.
In the calm, genteel ACC, where negative words aren't supposed to be uttered, where sacred cows still are sacred, where a controversy is to suggest Duke gets a favorable whistle, this would be wild.
If he takes the job, soon enough he'll be nose-to-nose with Williams, soon enough he'll have infuriated Krzyzewski, soon enough he'll orchestrate a fight with another ACC school (no doubt with that coach's approval) in an effort to start a hot new rivalry which he'll claim is more intense than Duke-Carolina.
Soon enough N.C. State will go from the other school in the Triangle to a brash, badgering, championship-caliber equal, a program that matters, a team to be feared and to be given attention.
That's what it wants. That's what he wants. And that, a little spice added to the mix, is what college hoops could use.
