From Bill Pennington of NYTimes.com: “John Calipari is in mea culpa mode, apologizing daily for the coaching blunders he has made with his young Kentucky basketball players. That is usually bad news for the rest of the teams in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
At the tournament two years ago, Calipari was incessantly saying how sorry he was for not getting more out of the freshman frontcourt wunderkind Anthony Davis. We know how that turned out. Kentucky won its first national championship in 14 years and Davis was named the Final Four’s most outstanding player.
Here we go again. Except this time Calipari has five freshmen, all of them N.B.A. prospects. When they flopped in the regular season and became the first preseason No. 1-ranked team to fall completely out of the top 25, Calipari’s kiddie corps was an easy target for criticism. Once hailed as the greatest recruiting class ever, it was pelted from every direction. With good reason.”