FOX Sports personality Clay Travis is known to say controversial things and much like Skip Bayless, that's how he makes a living. He was on Bo Mattingly's Sports Talk last Friday, the day after Kentucky basketball coach John Calipari was on ESPN all day promoting himself and his team.
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ESPN's own Dan Le Batard wasn't too fond of his own network giving Calipari a free recruiting platform and while Travis wasn't upset about that, he said that Calipari does other things that aren't exactly squeaky clean. On Mattingly's show, Travis said outright that Calipari is a cheater when it comes to recruiting and that he pays his players. Here's the full transcript of what he said:
"I think the overall impact of that pales in comparison to the money he's giving players to sign with him. Let's be honest. John Calipari is paying players and has been for years. It would be the biggest upset in the history of mankind for him not to be doing that. So this idea that if he goes on ESPN and he does a good job trying to pitch recruits that they're somehow more likely to go there than for the money thing is, I think, ludicrous. I think it's laughable to presume that he's not paying players, and I think lots of people pay players. But I think Kentucky basketball is one of the best-paying in college athletics, for sure."
"...I think John Calipari cheats his ass off. I think if he wrote a book, a tell-all book, it would be a bestseller. It would be about how to get guys in with test score grades that don't deserve to get in there, how to get grades changed, etc."
The test grades comments refer to Derrick Rose at Memphis who got in based on an SAT score that was not his —- someone else took the test for him. While Calipari has been accused of this before, he likely won't respond and will certainly never admit to doing anything like that.
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Travis might have gone too far on this one though as he sounds pretty irate on the subject. The fact that he also thinks other coaches do this doesn't really help his case either.
[h/t CollegeSpun]
