Calipari is... Boring?

It is odd to think that John Calipari taking the reigns of the Big Blue Nation would decrease my interest in summer recruiting. This is arguably the most exciting time ever to be a Cat fanatic, and you would think that a degenerate UK fan such as myself would be eating up any and every recruiting tidbit that hits the presses. That hasn't been the case. Recruiting has become very simplistic these days. I hesitate to use the word boring, but that is almost the case. Go find a ranking list of the top recruits and look at the very top to see who will be in Lexington. What's fun about that? All we have to do is figure out exactly who is the best, as a few other great players is all we need to feel out the roster as role players. Go get their uniform measurements and let's play some ball.

There are going to be top ten talents that we pass on because they aren't perfect fits. Tubby tried to reinvent the wheel and make backups and role players, such as his son Saul, into starters and main recruiting targets. If Billy Gillispie had a son, he would have traded him for the guys that we're going to pass on with Calipari.

Under Tubby, we were perpetually good enough to be competitive with just about anybody, but not quite good enough to get over the hump. We always SEEMED to be just one player away from the Final Four. We watched as Player X, a player we had already penciled into our roster and envisioned grandeur, chose another program. I am going to miss wondering what might have been had we landed Hansbrough instead of UNC, or if Michael Porter could be the next... I don't even know what he could have been the next of, but when I figure that out I will get back to you.

To me, it was so much more interesting to ask questions like:

'Is Vinny Zollo going to grow that extra 4 inches required to earn his keep in the SEC?'
'Why aren't all of our recruits nationally ranked?' (We all knew that ESPN and their ACC bias were behind this somehow.)
'Was Dakotah Euton's vertical leap going to reach double digits?'
'How would Michael Avery deal with puberty?'

These questions were so much more interesting than Calipari seemingly going to the grocery store to put together the best ingredients for his championship recipe.

I will have to learn how to deal with the Summer being a little bit boring and have to settle for actual performance on the court to fill some of that void. The great thing about Coach Cal being the preferred destination of the best PG's in the country is that other great players will naturally want to play with the most talented and unselfish point guard in the country. It is just going to make DeMarcus Cousins look even better to play with John Wall. This is a scenario that I expect to see play out every year or two in the recruiting cycle, with the best players in the country choosing the Big Blue Nation over everyone else... BORING!