Michigan State, Pittsburgh and Gonzaga are some random choices. Kentucky isn't a "good basketball school"?
They're not random at all. I was thinking of coaches who don't get the big time recruits yet continue to mold average recruits into great college basketball players, and Izzo, Dixon, and Few are prime examples. They all have certain coaching styles that are conducive to developing a certain toughness and basketball IQ in their players. I also thought of Bo Ryan, who is an amazing coach, but I've always seen him as more of a system coach. He recruits under-the-radar players that can excel with the swing offense, so while I'd consider him a great coach, I left him out because he's still a system coach in a lot of ways.
Coach Calipari, on the other hand, runs a pro-style offense that's all about spreading the floor, emphasizes the transition game, lets players have a lot of individual freedom, and doesn't place an emphasis on the fundamentals. He's basically created a glorified prep school for draft prospects.
It's easy to win when you have players like Derrick Rose, Tyreke Evans, John Wall, DeMarcus Cousins, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist, Anthony Davis, Alex Poythress, Nerlens Noel, and Archie Goodwin flowing through your program. Given the caliber of players that he's had, if he were a better coach, he'd have a better track record. Now that he's won a title, he's somehow validated as a coach, when in reality, he's just a great salesman that knows a little bit about basketball.
Trust me, I have hundreds of damning things against Calipari's coaching ability and recruiting tactics. I was close to the University of Memphis program all throughout high school, and I know what's going on with John Calipari better than most. If you want to keep getting into it, I'm okay with that, but I don't want to start typing that rant on Cal right now, because I have so much say on the subject that it'd honestly be time consuming to even scrape the surface.
