Talk is cheap? Memphis' Calipari will convince you otherwise

On the plane were Calipari, then-assistant Steve Roccaforte (now the head coach at Lamar), then-strength coach Rock Oliver (now an assistant strength coach with the Cincinnati Bengals) and me. A car picked us up at the airport. On the ride over Calipari rehearsed various talking points, all of which revolved around graduation rates and how they aren't figured properly and so on and so forth. This went on for 20 minutes before Roccaforte finally asked "Are they even going to ask you about graduation rates?" Calipari's response: "It doesn't matter what they ask me. This is what I'm talking about."

It was confusing ... and brilliant.

Story No. 3: The Doneal Mack story

Calipari is not good with numbers.

He's just not.

One time he tried to explain how the above-mentioned Massie was shooting "71 percent" from the field and that if he "kept it up" he'd break Bill Walton's record for highest field-goal percentage in a season. Naturally, I went and checked this out because it seemed like a great story for me to write.

With a little research I found that Massie was actually shooting 69 percent as opposed to 71 percent, and that even if he "kept it up" he wouldn't break the record for highest field goal percentage in the country because the record was (and still is) 74.6 percent. And, oh yeah, the record isn't held by Walton. Oregon State's Steve Johnson holds the record. Walton never shot better than 66.5 percent in any season at UCLA. That doesn't even rank among the top 25.

Which brings me to Doneal Mack.

Last season Mack had a nice little stretch of games where he was coming off the bench and making shots. Calipari was so excited about it that one night he explained to the local media how Mack was "leading the nation in points per minute." Boy, was that a story. Hosts talked about it on the radio and fans posted about it on the message board, and I'm surprised somebody didn't print celebratory T-shirts.

But it wasn't true.

It wasn't even close to being true.

You know who led the nation in points per minute last season? VMI's Reggie Williams.

Mack wasn't in the top 150 nationally or No. 1 on his own team (that was Chris Douglas-Roberts). But Calipari wanted to make the point that Mack was having a tremendous season. So he made the point with a manufactured statistic and did it with such conviction that most people just accepted it and repeated it and spent much of February and March talking about the greatness of Mack.

It was hilarious ... and brilliant.

'He is the best of the best'

I called R.C. Johnson on Monday night and told him I wanted to talk about his coach's ability to talk. I didn't really get a question out before the Memphis athletic director was providing a story about how he first met Calipari when Johnson was the AD at Temple and Calipari the coach at UMass.

"We were having an Atlantic 10 pre-conference meeting, and, of course, the big speakers at the time were John Chaney and John Calipari," Johnson said. "So John (Calipari) came in and he was great, and when it came time to hire a guy here at Memphis I remembered that first time I ever saw him speak and how great he was. As you recall, we were in pretty dire straits here (before Memphis hired Calipari), and we needed a spark for our program. John was my first choice. And part of that was because of his speaking ability and the way he can capture people.

"He's always had that ability," Johnson concluded. "He is the best of the best."

So get ready, fans and reporters and everybody else -- the best of the best is coming to San Antonio for the Final Four. He's going to say some smart things and some dumb things and some things that make you laugh and some things that make you think and some things that make you roll your eyes.

Odds are, he'll accomplish all that in his first interview session, then do it again in his second interview session and before it's over my guess is that he'll be leading the nation in quality quotes per minute.

In other words, he's going to be the Doneal Mack of press conferences.

Or something like that.