When it comes to the one-and-done rule in NCAA college basketball, no one has utilized it more to their advantage than Kentucky Wildcats head coach John Calipari.
Since taking control of UK’s program in 2009, 21 of the 24 former Kentucky players who were selected in the first round of the NBA draft – including Anthony Davis, John Wall and Karl-Anthony Towns – left after their freshman-year season.
There are many programs – just see Virginia – that haven’t been as eager to embrace the one-and-done recruitment style as Kentucky has been and Calipari has often taken criticism for it.
That hasn’t stopped him from talking about it and in a recent interview with GQ, Calipari shared his thoughts on, among other things, a way to fix a college system that many consider to be broken because it encourages top-level players to leave school early in order to get paid in the NBA. Essentially, Calipari suggests a way to fix a system that he has become adept at exploiting.
“If you want kids to stay in school longer, let their families take loans, the ones that have pro potential,” he told GQ. “Players with pro potential should be able to request a loan from the NBA. They can say no. They can say there’s a max of $50,000 for your family. Maybe that gets a kid to stay in school a year longer, because he’s like, ‘Mom, just take that.’ And now we eliminate the third party, and when the kid becomes an NBA player, he pays back the money.”
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