The year is 2050.
The NCAA has long since been smashed to pieces in the courts, replaced by a private equity conglomerate. Eligibility has been expanded to seven years, and there’s now a midseason transfer window before conference play starts. Your alma mater’s best player is a 33-year-old from Lithuania.
Buried in the rubble of this hellscape is a 91-year-old John Calipari — his hairline still hasn’t budged — hosting a five-star freshman for an official visit. His former players’ NBA contract earnings, as he loves reminding people on The Pat McAfee Show three times a year, have now surpassed the combined GDP of Eastern Europe.
The now-wrinkled Italian from Pittsburgh still stumps for the sanctity of the college game in every press conference. (All the reporters have been laid off, and questions are handled by AI chat bots that have signed waivers not to engage in extracurriculars with Mike Vrabel.)
Calipari, above all, still wants this postmodern sporting world to know: You can pry these one-and-dones out of his cold, dead hands.
In the year 2026, Coach Cal’s still very much warm hands will soon again greet the nation’s top-ranked recruiting class after the Monday commitment of Miikka Muurinen. With Arkansas’ continued pursuit of Obinna Ekezie Jr., that quartet of five-stars may soon become a quintet.
While pretty much every other big-time college basketball coach leans more and more on the transfer portal with each passing year, Calipari seems to be doubling down on the prep talent pipeline he knows best. With yet another middle finger to the status quo, this maestro is cementing himself as a status quo-busting figure akin to another man from the Northeast who’s been in the political realm for ages.
John Calipari and…Bernie Sanders?
Hear me out…
Bernie Sanders, the senior United States senator from Vermont, had humble beginnings in Brooklyn as the son of an immigrant painter. Calipari had a similar blue-collar background; he’s the grandson of an immigrant coal miner, his father was a mill worker and airport baggage handler. Mom, meanwhile, toiled away in a school cafeteria.
Those working-class roots stoked a burning feistiness within. Both men have defined themselves railing against the establishment while working at the highest levels of said establishment for decades.
Even before he became the mayor of small-town Burlington, Vt., Sanders was dedicated to the progressive movement.
He applied for conscientious objector status to avoid fighting in what he viewed as an unjust war in Vietnam — history would prove him quite right on that front. From Kuwait and Iraq to Afghanistan and now Iran, Sanders has been consistently anti-war throughout his 84 years of life.
