I'm sick, and the NBA is a Calipari enabler.

I hate few things in life. Generally speaking, I'm pretty ok with a lot of stuff. I hate being sick though. Hate it. I also hate raw tomatoes. Just fyi. I also don't like being told what I should like. I tend to slightly hate defensive linemen. Oh, and of course, I hate John Calipari. The NBA, in trying to, I guess, promote the college experience and force kids to get an "education," has paved the way to John Calipari's meteoric resurgence as a college coach. In the current NBA Collective Bargaining Agreement, which may soon go the way of the Dodo, NBA Commissioner David Stern swung his prodigious wang around and trout-slapped the NBA Players' Union, forcing them to agree to a one-year rule for NBA Draft eligibility. In doing so, the NBA has unintentionally not only made college basketball lamer, but it has exposed the college game and high school game to the most unnerving and unscrupulous coaching figure since Coach Jack Reilly and those ruthless Hawks.

John Calipari first garnered attention for "guiding" the UMass Minutemen of Lou Roe, Marcus Camby, et al to the top of the rankings back in the mid '90s. It was cute then. A mid-major, sticking it to the Kentuckys of the college basketball world, getting Amherst some national hoops attention. It got Calipari so much cred that he was signed away to a lucrative deal with the New Jersey Nets. We quickly found out two things however. First, the UMass bball program was dirtier than a North Portland prostitute. Second, John Calipari sucked when everyone else was spending the same amount of money on players as his team was. Missed that competitive advantage, didn'tcha goomba?

Calipari was an afterthought. He was doneski. With the stink of UMass on him, as well the general stink of the Garden State, no major program would take a crack at Calipari. So where did he go? Well, if you're up on your John Grisham reading, it should come as no surprise that a morally compromised Italian gentleman made his way to Memphis. What happened next was not all that different from what happened before. John Calipari took a small program, in a midmajor conference, to unprecedented heights. There were some differences, of course. Memphis already had a huge arena, and a local groundswell of hoops talent, previously producing such specimens as Penny Hardaway. And a HUGE difference for Calipari this time around had to do with David Stern's half-cocked attempt at "protecting the NBA" and maybe "protecting teenaged basketball players."

Starting with Kevin Garnett in 1996, there had been a spate of high school players making the jump from senior prom to NBA benches. Some players, like Garnett and Kobe Bryant, were game changers; young, gifted, driven men with the desire and focus to make immediate impacts in a league with the best basketball players in the world in their late 20s and early 30s. But for the occasional watershed players like Kobe, KG, T Mac, and Le Bron, and before them Moses Malone and Daryl Dawkins, there were unfortunate results such as these. And those are just some examples. During the onslaught of high school draftees, teams were taking a stab at young men who in several instances were not in any way prepared for the NBA lifestyle, pressure, and finances. Every team would, because you didn't want to be the team that passed up on someone who would some day be great. This became especially true once rookie salary caps were installed and the NBDL became serviceable. A lot of these young men, particularly those who retained agents thereby losing their NCAA eligibility, and who didn't get drafted in the first round, thus missing out on a guaranteed contract, found themselves disillusioned, out of the league, and out of any chance at a college hoops dream.

Coupled with this was David Stern's desire to sterilize the NBA public image. Concerned that "people" (in other words white consumers) were associating pro basketball with a thug mentality and lifestyle, Stern has instituted such things as dress codes league-wide, and not coincidentally, he forced the aforementioned rule whereby high school players have to wait a year before declaring for the Draft. Oh sure, Stern dressed it up by saying that young men should see if college is right for them, and that so many young men just aren't mature enough or ready for the rigors of professional sports, but don't piss on my leg and tell me it's raining, Dave. It was all an attempt to repair the NBA's deteriorating PR status in suburban USA. The logic being that if the NBA can siphon young (typically black) men off to college for even a year, and ward them off, maybe it can dodge the occasional disastrous bullet.

What it does of course is further make a mockery of the institution of college basketball. And it opens the door for dirty shyster coaches like John Calipari who just "happen" to always find themselves associated with dirty recruiting dealings. Here Coach Cal was, new job at Memphis, with the ability to recruit young men specifically with the slogan of "just come for one year, we'll showcase you, and then you can leave college." (You'd think that'd be enough of a sell for Calipari, but he apparently still needed to do other nefarious stuff to get Derrick Rose into Memphis.) One by one, the best of the best out of high school have gone one and done in college basketball, essentially invalidating whatever the one year rule was supposed to accomplish, rendering a stint in college as nothing more than the Quantum Leap waiting room, wherein these players who would have gone in the first round in the NBA just kind of mess around for a year, watch life progress from a far, maybe go to class occasionally (maybe, if the TAs are hot enough), and then as soon as they can, declare for the draft and drop out of college.

Not only does this seem completely pointless, but it can also strip a team's coffers bare. There are some programs that will reload day after day after day, and won't be affected by a player leaving early, but then every now and then, you have a season like the Pac 10 has had this year. UCLA has lost so many players after a year to the NBA the past couple years that it is just pathetic this year. As UCLA basketball goes, so goes the conference. The Pac 10 is, in one word, nauseating. Also, do coaches want to commit resources to recruiting a star for what will be just one season? As a coach, can you effectively construct and prepare a program knowing you may only have a cornerstone for one season? How will that affect the chemistry with OTHER players? While some may argue that the NBA has done college basketball a solid by forcing the nation's top talent to play collegiate for a year, it's actually cheapened the product and made D1 revenue sports even more shallow and profit-driven than they already were.

And again, as I've noted, it pisses me off that it makes John Calipari's life that much easier. He has parlayed his dirty Memphis stint (their final four trip has been stripped from the history books due to NCAA infractions) into a lucrative deal at Kentucky. Derrick Rose, Tyreke Evans, John Wall...Calipari isn't a coach so much as he is an NBA middle man. I don't know if he receives any sort of commission from the Nets for his development of Wall, or if the Maloofs lined his pockets for keeping Evans warm for a semester, but he really ought to explore his options.

So let's cut the crap. Stop lying. Let adults play pro ball. No more charade Commissioner Stern. Don't feign concern for guys you don't know. Force teams to do the same evaluation of young players they would do normally. Let them bare the risk for not seeing the immaturity of draft picks. Brandon Jennings has already demonstrated how stupid this rule is by playing pro ball in Europe for a year after high school, effectively accomplishing an end-run and getting paid. Hold John Calipari accountable, force him to actually recruit college players rather than mercenaries who don't give two shits about the fact they're playing college ball for 4 months. And send me some damn chicken noodle soup. And maybe some more OJ. Thanks. I have to go blow my nose now.