3 reasons why John Calipari not winning Coach of the Year is completely unfair

Despite being the first coach to ever lead his team to a 36-0 record in college basketball, Kentucky coach John Calipari was not named national coach of the year. Instead the award went to Virginia’s Tony Bennett, whose team won the ACC, but lost in the round of 32 of this year’s NCAA Tournament.

Bennett is a fabulous coach, and he has done a very impressive job turning around the Cavaliers over the past few seasons. Also, these ballots were due before Bennett’s team ran into its postseason stumbles, so it is reasonable to have voted for him given the combination of talent and UVA’s record. But even so, Calipari has been the best coach this year. He accumulated the most talent, he’s winning with a very young team, he found a way to suppress the egos of very good players and he’s 36-0. His team has literally done something that has never been done before, yet he isn’t the coach of the year. That means he’s probably never going to win the award.

This is not surprising. Coach of the year awards rarely go to the coaches with the best teams, but rather, to the coaches of teams that we don’t expect to be that good. That’s why Jim Tressel and Urban Meyer never won the Big Ten coach of the year award at Ohio State, but Ron Zook did. And it’s why Meyer was somehow not the Big Ten coach of the year, but Jerry Kill — whose Minnesota team went a whopping 8-5 — was.

In the words of Ron Swanson, “Awards are stupid, but they’d be less stupid if they went to the right people.” So here’s a guide of how to make sure you are giving coach of the year awards to the right people in the future.

Developing players is part of coaching, but generally, coaches who win are also coaches who bring in great talent. That’s a pretty hard thing to do, as evidenced by the fact that Calipari has recruited very well everywhere he has gone. Presumably, Jerry Kill and other try-hard coaches in football and basketball want to get better players, but have been unsuccessful in that pursuit.

There is something to say about recognizing how coaches respond to recruiting limitations at various schools, but don’t punish them for getting good players. That’s part of their job.

There is likely a large segment of sports writers who will never vote for Calipari to win a coach of the year award because they think he’s slimy and ruining the game. That is dumb, since there is absolutely no evidence that Calipari cheated to get any of these players. The same is true for Jerry Tarkanian, who never won the award despite making UNLV, of all places, a national powerhouse.

This is also not the “overachiever” award. Mike Krzyzewski and Calipari should not be exempt just because they win a lot. If a good coach has an exceptional year, maybe they should be recognized for that.

There are a lot of people who don’t like the “one-and-done” phenomenon in college sports and dislike Calipari (and Krzyzewski) getting those kinds of players. However, winning with those players isn’t necessarily easier than it is to win with established players who have been together for four years.

Calipari took a bunch of stars who had never played together before -- most hadn’t played in college before -- and made them a nearly untouchable team in less than a year. That is extremely difficult to do! Most coaches expect young teams to have growing pains, but Calipari’s team has won despite them.

Yes, Calipari had good players, but he did an incredible job with them, and it’s unfair to assume that any overachieving coach would have done as good of a job as he did with the same Kentucky players this year.