Column: Kentucky’s title shows true values of college sports

The framework of college basketball has changed, and it will likely change even more in the wake of Kentucky’s dominant run. In the face of a handful of steadily improving teams centered on young players that cropped up over the last decade — Kentucky foremost among them — purists leaned on the notion that experience was essential to having success in March. They were emboldened by Kentucky’s exits in the last two years, losses in which they were inarguably the more talented team: an Elite Eight loss to West Virginia that saw the Wildcats shoot 4-for-32 from the three-point line and a Final Four nailbiter against UConn, a team that was led by senior Kemba Walker. This was confirmation! Players must, in order to function as a real team, need to grow and learn as a unit over a more sustained period of time.

But in retrospect, with this latest tournament as reference point, those losses appear to have had nothing to do with youth and everything to do with the fact that sometimes shots don’t fall; sometimes the better team loses. ‘Maturity’ as a secret ingredient was a myth; what actually matters, it should be obvious to anyone at this point, is lots and lots of cohesive talent. And Kentucky has, and will continue to have, an abundance of that for the foreseeable future.

I’ve been calling the men who play for the Kentucky men’s basketball team ‘players.’ This, somehow, is a matter of some contention: At the Final Four in New Orleans, the NCAA prohibited journalists from referring to Anthony Davis and his teammates as anything other than ‘student-athletes’ during press conferences. But the monolithic, exploitative entity doth protest too much: There is clearly a growing sense of urgency among the higher-ups that the recent onslaught of one-and-dones has transformed some institutions of higher education into obligatory, one-year trade schools. Which is true. It’s an open secret: Michael Kidd-Gilchrist didn’t choose to attend Kentucky because it promised him a great education.

John Calipari knows this better than anyone. He is open in expressing the sentiment that getting his players lucrative professional contracts is the first order of business and that winning championships is secondary. The fact that he can do the latter through the former must be incredibly frustrating to anyone who believes high-level college basketball is still, at its heart, about amateurism and teaching young men and women about hard work and good character. Calipari’s team and philosophy brings this antiquated belief out into the harsh light, obliterates it, makes it seem naive and childish.

But slow down: Isn’t that what these players basically are? Children? And doesn’t said belief still survive in other, less successful pockets of college sports? Like maybe here, for instance: I have no problem at all asserting that the members of our varsity teams, college basketball included, are student-athletes in the fullest sense of the phrase.

There is a tendency to follow and venerate winning — winning is an American obsession, winning breeds fans and money, etc. — but watching Calipari after the game on Monday night, he didn’t look like a man who cared about the title at all. Nor, when on two previous occasions he had his Final Four teams wiped from the record for academic transgressions, did he appear too broken up.

We want to vilify this — winning is supposed to be the most important thing — but maybe he has a wonderfully rational perspective. It’s college kids playing college sports, after all. And for all the talk about how the way Calipari operates is violating the integrity of the sport, he seems to be the only coach at a high-level program who truly, deeply, transparently cares about his players and their futures more than he cares about the outcome of a tournament.

If I were a five-star recruit who wanted to play professionally, I’d sure want to play for him, and it’s for the same reason that if I were a two-star who wanted to be a doctor I’d try my hardest to get into a place like Princeton: College is about preparing kids, some of them athletes, for the future. Do we really have to bring morality into it? Do we really have to insist there is a right and wrong way to do the preparing?