Calipari speaks his mind, and links!

Going a little retro today with some linkage from the Internets world. Kinda miss doing that. Maybe we'll do it more often starting ... now.

You can say what you want about John Calipari, and many people do, but give the dude some credit for speaking his mind.

We have so little of that today, and in a lot of cases we need genuineness and sincerity now more than ever.

Calipari recently sat down with college hoops writer Mike DeCourcy -- at a Dunkin Donuts, of all places -- and did not disappoint. The interview is lengthy but absolutely worth your time.

Here's an excerpt you might consider notable:

SN: Something people use against you a lot are the vacated Final Fours. One thing we wondered, how do the players who were on those teams feel about that designation?

CALIPARI: I wouldn’t be surprised if the Memphis kids come back and sue the NCAA. Those guys are saying, “We earned those wins. ... None of us knew anything about anything, Coach. That’s wrong. Why are they punishing me and the number of wins I had?” Like, Antonio Anderson and Robert Dozier had the most wins of anyone over a four-year period, but they take away 38.

They’re not going to be around long. The NCAA will not. Before I retire from coaching, they will no longer oversee college athletics. They will, but it won’t be the four power conferences—they’ll be on their own. And the main thing is, do you really care about these kids? They’ll get mad that I say it. The NCAA Tournament, for example. It’s more about the selection committee getting on TV, everybody getting their tickets on the aisle, down low, all the parties they go to, the traveling. But we don’t take the parents of the participants. But they take their kids and their families.

The officials will get better hotels than some of their teams. And I know it for a fact. The decisions they make on the $2,000 (expense allowance for student-athletes)—it should have been $4,000. It’s a stipend. It’s not salary. It’s not “pay-for-play.” It’s a stipend. It’s expenses. And then schools vote against it. All this stuff piles up to where people are going to say, “Enough’s enough.”

And another:

SN: One of the interesting things about the vacated Final Fours is Louisville promotes Rick Pitino as the only coach to take three different schools to the Final Four. Do you look at that as a shot at you?

CALIPARI: No. Don’t care. Don’t care. I’m not doing it for that. Other guys are doing it to be the only guy, to win the games, to try to do this and this, to promote themselves as the “only” guy—I don’t do it. I don’t care.

Boom.

Staying on the topic of Q&A's with coaches, the AJC has a long one with Paul Johnson.

PJ is a sensitive dude, and that's illustrated in this exchange:

Q: To what degree did youth impact the season?

A: You go back and you look at the last four years, we’ve probably won more games than anybody since Coach (Bobby) Dodd, so they’ve actually performed well. (Ed. note: Tech won 43 games from 2008 to 2011, third most since Dodd’s retirement for a four-year span since 1966. Tech won 46 between 2006 and 2009.) Fans are like everybody else. They just want to win once a week. And sometimes they have selective memories about how it used to be. We’d like to win every game, too. That’s the goal. If you go back and look, Georgia Tech has not won the conference championship every year.

The guy is asked about youth and he turns it into a seethe session about criticism. Imagine if the guy worked at a place whose fans actually, you know, cared about football.

In The Post and Courier, Travis Sawchik has a nice story on Tanner Smith.

And this columnist from Richmond also takes notice of Smith's story.

Virginia's Tony Bennett accept Bernard James' apology for the recent kicking incident.

"Very classy. Everything you know about that guy is classy. It was just heat-of-the-moment. It wasn't like he broke [Harris'] rib. He just gave him a little love tap with his foot."

My man Seth Greenberg observes that both Virginia Tech and Clemson are "offensively challenged" in this article, and that deficiency was certainly on display in the teams' two meetings this season.

In the first game, Virginia Tech didn't score a basket in the final 5:57 ... and won.

In the second game, Clemson went the final 3:17 without a basket ... and won.

LW