Mike Celizic

Tubby Smith hightailed it out of town, his one measly championship not enough to placate the jackals in Lexington. Rick Pitino quickly said he’d been there and done that and is happy as a horse in bluegrass at Louisville.

John Calipari signed an extension at Memphis. Guess the only guy left for the Kentucky job was Billy Donovan.

That’s how the chain of logic proceeded. It’s the way it always goes when one of the glamour jobs in sports opens up. Little programs can go out and hire the young up-and-comers, but the big guys have a pathological need to take somebody else’s genius. It’s safer that way for the AD doing the hiring because if it doesn’t work out, he can always argue that he hired the certified winner that all the columnists were saying was the guy they had to have. It’s also an ego trip to steal somebody else’s star and make him your own.

It’s an ego trip for the coach, too, to be wined, dined and buried in money by one of the legendary programs. And there are times when I’d tell him to go for it. This isn’t one of them. Kentucky wants him to finally be a worthy successor to Adolph Rupp, who last coached when dinosaurs were still roaming the earth.

But he’s in a big-time school in a big-time conference doing what Rupp once did in bluegrass country — building a great program. He can be the coach they’re still talking about 100 years from now in Florida and have an arena named after him with his likeness in bronze outside the main entrance.

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Somebody has to start every great program. John Wooden created the UCLA legend. Duke was a nice program but nothing special before Mike Krzyzewski got there. Connecticut was nothing before Jim Calhoun took over. Georgetown was a pansy school when John Thompson started cracking the whip. Rupp made Kentucky.

If I were Donovan, I’d have sooner slid down a barbed-wire banister than take a job as the next guy to be told five years hence he can’t carry Adolph Rupp’s jockstrap. He’s got a great thing going in Florida, with two straight titles, and if he stays there he can be to the Gators what Rupp is in Kentucky, what Wooden is in UCLA, what Coach K is in Durham.

Given the choice between following a legend — even 40 years later — or being one, I’d take the latter every day.

What’s beyond unfortunate is that these things always seem to come up while the prey in the headlights is still engaged in trying to get his team to a championship.

That was Donovan’s situation, not that it seemed to bother he or his Gators in winning a second straight national title. He’s got 11 years in at Florida, where he took over a non-existent program at a football school at the tender age of 30. He built it into one of the top teams in the nation and was the last man standing in the 2006 tournament. Now he’s the first man since Mike Krzyzewski to win back-to-back titles and one of only five overall to accomplish that feat.

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