Surprise, Surprise

As if everybody didn't know how much of a snake John Calipari was already, here's a little more fuel to add to the fire. In a Lexington Herald-Ledger report, the UK men's basketball team posted a cumulative team GPA of 2.02, worst of the nine SEC teams that reported their GPA's to the newspaper. Two players on the team had GPA's of 1.67 and 1.76, and two other players were either at 2.0, or below. UK mandates that athletes at the school must have a cumulative 1.8 GPA at the start of their sophomore seasons, so it only makes sense that the players with 1.67 and 1.76 GPA's were freshmen. Keep in mind that four of the five freshmen on this year's team made themselves eligible for the upcoming NBA Draft. Jon Hood will be back for his sophomore season, and Calipari stated that John Wall had all A's and B's during the fall semester, so that leaves Eric Bledsoe, Daniel Orton, and Demarcus Cousins. Only two players posted a GPA of higher than 3.0.

Sandy Bell, who is UK's senior associate athletic director, stated that the switch from Billy Gillespie to John Calipari as head coach, and the adjustment process of coming to college was the reason behind the low team GPA. I guess classes got much, much harder when Calipari came to town. Come on Sandy, who are you trying to kid here?

I did a little research of my own, and I found that UK is rated by US News as the 128th best university in the country in terms of academics. Is a GPA of at least 2.5 that difficult at a school that accepts 78% of applicants? And, remember that athletes on track for an NBA future don't exactly get too involved in genetics, chemistry, or hard-core business courses. If this isn't another reason to get rid of the bulls*** NBA one year rule, then I don't know what will force the NCAA's hand in speaking up. But, John Calipari has seemingly come out clean in every instance of NCAA investigations, so it appears that nothing will change anytime soon.