The book banning evil comes to my own backyard. Temecula is just a few miles away from Fallbrook. Banning a book because it mentions someone whose lifestyle you don’t like is really, really dangerous. We shouldn’t rewrite history – it was what it was, and our students need to know the truth about the past and learn from it.

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I’ve made my decision on at least one of the travel cameras for the Africa trip this summer. The Canon Powershot SX740. 20 megapixels, 65X optical zoom, and 0.6 pounds. Perfect blend of size and power to zoom in on wildlife. I’ve owned much earlier versions of the Powershot, and they were always great little cameras.

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NIL money has changed college sports into semipro teams. It’s a fundamental change, and not a good one. I think it’s damaging the game. This excerpt from A Sea of Blue is a great example:

If we can get past the tampering stuff, the news here implies that things between John Calipari and Antonio Reeves aren’t exactly friendly right now. I talked to David Sisk from Cats Illustrated yesterday and he told me that Reeves was very unhappy with his NIL deals and was making five figures while he saw his teammates make six figures or, in the case of Oscar Tshiebwe, more than that.

Whatever your opinions are about NIL do not matter here so I’m not going to debate whether or not this is good for college basketball because we are beyond that point. John Calipari has a fundamental and possibly a program changing decision to make: is he going to give Reeves what he thinks he is worth or is he going to let another team do it? 

Calipari has plenty of NIL money to work with but he has consistently stated that he is not going to throw out numbers at guys. Instead, he presents the NIL deals as an opportunity and not a concrete figure. Basically, he’s not going to tell them how much they’ll make at Kentucky but they’ll have chances to make plenty. This philosophy seemingly goes against what other teams are doing in regards to NIL.

If he declines to play ball on this matter with Reeves then Calipari is sending a clear signal that he is going to do it his way. His way may have already lost Hunter Dickinson and maybe Keshad Johnson as well. These transfer guys mostly know they’re not going to the NBA so they have to make as much money in college as they can in a short amount of time. That seems to be Reeves’ playbook.

With the portal already thin, Calipari has a lot of work to do to get guys on this team ASAP. It’s the eleventh hour. Is he going to adjust and evolve like he always has in his career? Or is he going to continue to go into these recruitments with one hand tied behind his back?

Reeves and Calipari are set to meet this weekend.

NIL doesn’t work the way I thought it would. The introduction of payments to a team changes everything. The college game I remember is gone for good.