No longer about the label

 Look, John Calipari nailed it on the screws. No one thinks of Babe Parilli -- or even Bear Bryant -- when you say “the University of Kentucky."

Which is to say, as Calipari did the other day, that Kentucky is not a football school. It's a basketball school.

Say "Kentucky", and you think of Adolph Rupp and Joe B. Hall and Tubby Smith, not the Bear, who did indeed coach football there once upon a time.  You think of Alex Groza and Ralph Beard and Jack Givens and Dan Issel; Kenny "Sky" Walker and Jamal Mashburn and Anthony Davis. And several dozen others.

Basketball. 

That's UK. That's the label.

That's the label even when the football is good in Lexington, as it has been lately. Across the last four years, the football Wildcats have won 33 games and won four bowl games. That's prime stuff in the SEC.

But when Calipari said the other day Kentucky was a basketball school the way Alabama and Georgia were football schools, he wasn't thinking about that. He was thinking about the leaky roof in the Wildcats practice gym. And maybe, deep down where a man's insecurities live, he was thinking about something else, too.

Like, I don't know, the way college basketball is now merely a handmaiden for King Football.

All the seismic activity among the top D-I conferences, after all, is about football, not basketball. Oklahoma isn't fleeing the Big 12 for the SEC because it's better for hoops, after all. Ditto USC and UCLA heading to the Big Ten, and the Big Ten cozying up to NBC. Ditto whatever happens to the ACC once the Big Two begin raiding that conference.

The ACC, once a conference synonymous with basketball. The ACC, for whom, like everyone else, football is driving the bus now.

Because of the March Madness ATM, college buckets will never lapse into complete irrelevancy, but right now you can see it from here. And you've gotta wonder if Coach Cal and a lot of his fellow basketball coaches aren't getting a tad queasy about that. You've gotta wonder if what he said the other day wasn't solely driven by a sub-standard practice facility, but by the creeping suspicion that basketball is just along for football's ride anymore.

It's possible I'm reading too much into this. ("No, really?" you're saying). But you can't blame me for thinking otherwise, right?