Throughout his coaching career, whether at UMass or Memphis or Kentucky or Arkansas, John Calipari has built a reputation for himself as one of college basketball’s foremost iconoclasts — and one of its boldest truth-tellers. While other coaches and other programs were concerned with the pieties of amateurism and afraid to ruffle any feathers, only Cal was prepared to tell it like it was, cutting through the bureaucratic BS of the college game and telling things like they really were.
Of course, ironically enough, that reputation was something of a fiction itself. In reality, Cal has never been all that concerned with telling the truth; he’s concerned with telling whatever version of the truth most benefits him in a given moment, whether that’s trying to land a new job or a new five-star recruit. Occasionally those two things overlap, but when they do, it’s purely coincidental.
Which brings us to Monday, when the Arkansas head man dropped a pipe bomb ahead of his Razorbacks’ SEC Tournament opener against South Carolina…