John Calipari discusses new book, NCAA issues and openly gay players

• The UK coach spoke to USA TODAY Sports following his team%27s national runner-up finish
• Calipari thinks the media should buy tickets to the NCAA tournament

Kentucky coach John Calipari wants to make a few things clear.

First: He doesn't hate the NCAA.

"I owe the NCAA a lot," Calipari told USA TODAY Sports. "I had a chance to play college basketball and work for universities in the NCAA. So I'm not agreeing with all the critics of the NCAA. My thing is this: Every decision should be made for the kids. That's it."

Second: He's not a fan of the one-and-done stigma that hovers over him.

"There's this misunderstanding that if players stay longer than one year, they've failed. That's ludicrous," Calipari said. "Every kid is different — mentally, physically and in skill set. ...My job is to develop players, young men who are ready to move on to success. These kids all have a genius just like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs when they didn't stay in college. They come with a suitcase and that suitcase has aspirations and goals. And some of that is coming from a family where they have to dream beyond their surroundings."

On the back end of a media tour for his upcoming book, Players First: Coaching from the Inside Out, co-written by Michael Sokolove, Calipari spoke to USA TODAY Sports about Kentucky's national runner-up team and a handful of things in today's college game.

Q: What's wrong with the NCAA?

A: The ultimate lie is that basketball players are amateur athletes. The food issue, I've been talking about that for years. The idea is that if you give these kids a bagel it's OK but if you give them peanut butter it's a violation. It's ridiculous. And why shouldn't parents go on a team plane? Why can't we help these kids fly home during Christmas. Why can't kids sign autographs when they're not allowed to have a job? Basically, we're running a railroad and we're not worried about moving the people. You've gotta move the people or you're out of business. Our people just happen to be student-athletes.

Q: You mentioned in recent interviews that you'd like for families to travel to postseason games for free, and that the money could come from the news media. Can you elaborate on this particular stance?

A: You work for a major media organization and my guess is most of you would say, 'We just need a work area.' Who would be offended if food wasn't paid for? Your company will pay for it. These other blogs would be offended because they don't have companies to pay for it. That was my point, and that's just one of many areas where we do ridiculous things and could just use that money.

Q: Were you surprised with your team's success in the NCAA tournament after a season of growing pains?

A: No. I said before I wrote my book before the season even started, 'If this team is playing harder than the other team, playing for one another and having fun, then they'll be playing in April. It's crazy that happened. ... It's all about coming together. I think people think you have to have players for four years to create a relationship. That's wrong. You have people together for three months and then they get married and want to spend the rest of their lives together ... and they do. With these kids, you can't say, 'Don't worry about you.' These kids have their futures riding on their career. They'll say, 'I can't give up everything or I won't survive.' To buy in, I have to have their back. What we have (at Kentucky) is a learning lab. With this group, we saw a change when I was able to start coaching basketball and I didn't have to coach intensity, unselfishness and having fun. They started doing that on their own.

Q: Your former player and colleague, UMass coach Derek Kellogg, recently stood behind Division I's first openly gay player, Derrick Gordon, when he came out to the public last week. What would you have done in Derek's shoes and in your opinion, do you expect there to be more gay student-athletes who reveal themselves?

A: Derek approached me on how to handle the situation and the first thing I told him was, 'You've gotta praise this kid for his courage.' It takes a lot of courage to do something like that. What does it all mean? I don't know. I do know about diversity in basketball, and our sport seems ahead of the curve on those kind of things. I had a family ask me 12-15 years ago how many white players I had and how many black players I had on my team. I didn't even know. I was proud of how Derek handled it. There's going to be backlash for (Gordon) but at the end of the day it should be about basketball."

Scott Gleeson, a national college basketball writer/digital producer for USA TODAY Sports, is on Twitter @ScottMGleeson.