The Kentucky Wildcats and their coach, John Calipari, are back in the Final Four. And, to the chagrin of some college-basketball watchers, this year’s squad is more Calipari-like than ever, featuring five freshmen in its starting rotation. That hasn’t happened since the Michigan Wolverines, propelled by their young and captivating “Fab Five,” made it all the way to the championship game, in 1992—only to have that record vacated in a scandal involving Chris Webber, the team’s forward, and a booster with a lot of money. As it happens, both Webber and Calipari are part of the story of this year’s tournament. Each man, in his own way, has scrambled the myths that the N.C.A.A. tells us about amateurism in America.

Calipari’s system goes more or less like this: building on your past success, recruit the best young talent in the country; make the new players meet only the most basic academic standards; give them plenty of chances to show off their skills in front of television audiences and pro scouts; and swiftly guide them, likely after just one season in college, to a job in the N.B.A. Rinse and repeat, year after year. (Whether this is much different from other major programs is a matter of debate.) Kentucky won the national championship in 2012 using this model, but the following year’s team, with an entirely different starting lineup, didn’t even make the tournament. Kentucky began this season with another highly touted squad, but, by early March, it looked listless. The team entered the tournament to little fanfare, as a meagre No. 8 seed. Had Calipari’s 2012 title been a fluke? Analysts pointed to a team like Florida, the No. 1 seed, with four senior starters and two wins over Kentucky this season, as evidence that experience and team chemistry might still trump raw talent.

Florida is in the Final Four, too. If it beats Connecticut (which was barred from the tournament last year after the team failed to meet N.C.A.A. academic standards), and were Kentucky to get past Wisconsin, the championship game could feature one of those cherished “big idea” matchups: Florida’s seasoned team versus Kentucky’s loose affiliation of semi-pro mercenaries. Never mind that both sides are still basically kids (and unpaid ones, at that), or that Florida’s older players most likely would have left college early for the N.B.A. if it had been a viable option. The particulars would be overlooked in favor of The Narrative: young versus slightly older, which, in this case, is shorthand for evil versus good.

Kentucky’s late resurgence this season has afforded us another chance to consider Calipari. For years, he has been branded as a scurrilous opportunist. He rose to national prominence when he coached the University of Massachusetts to the Final Four, in 1996. But those tournament wins were later stripped by the N.C.A.A., after it was determined that the team’s star player had received money from an agent. By then, Calipari had left for the N.B.A., where he coached the New Jersey Nets for a little more than two seasons, before being fired. He returned to the college game, spending nearly a decade at Memphis. But, again, there was scandal: an investigation found that someone else had taken the SATs for the Memphis standout Derrick Rose, and the entire 2007-2008 season, during which Memphis reached the championship game, was wiped from the record books. Calipari had once again already moved on, this time to his current position, at Kentucky. The N.C.A.A. did not implicate Calipari in either investigation, yet the sanctions and the erased wins clung to him like a bad smell. The revolving door of talent at Kentucky from high school to the pros did little to help his huckster image.

But, lately, Calipari doesn’t look so bad. Perhaps it is simply that the N.C.A.A.’s amateur model looks more absurd and unfair by the day. Maybe it is Calipari’s frank description of his own undertaking, and the way that he talks about what he owes to his players. “Kids are going on to the league from us and performing, and I’m proud of that,” he said this week. “Would I like to have had them for four years? Yes. But I also like what’s happened for them and their families.” Since Calipari arrived at Kentucky, in 2009, sixteen of his players have been drafted by N.B.A. teams. All five of this year’s freshmen starters could be drafted this summer. Calipari has worked within the rules of the N.C.A.A. to steer young players toward millions of dollars in the pros. Rather than opine about concepts such as leadership and personal growth, he has spoken in the plainer, more honest idiom of the market.

But it’s not necessarily the free market. Calipari is no revolutionary; he continues to benefit from the N.C.A.A.’s shoddy model of the amateur athlete. Last weekend, when the Kentucky guard Aaron Harrison hit a three-pointer to beat Michigan, Calipari was rewarded with a hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar bonus for reaching the Final Four. His assistant coaches and the Southeastern Conference all made money, too. Harrison, meanwhile, earned a pat on the ass and a trip to Arlington, Texas.

The Kentucky players have downplayed their connection to Fab Five Michigan team, perhaps because they had not yet been born in 1992. But you don’t have to look very hard to find the lingering influence of those Wolverines on the tournament. In fact, you see it at just about every commercial break this year: Chris Webber, in a maize-and-blue jersey, selling value meals for Burger King.

Webber was the anchor of the 1992 team, a talented forward who could rebound, pass, and shoot. During his two years at Michigan, he helped the team reach the championship game twice (the latter ending, disastrously, on the most famous timeout in the history of sports). But his lasting legacy is his role in a scandal involving the team booster Ed Martin, who, an investigation uncovered, paid Webber two hundred and eighty thousand dollars between 1988 and 1993. (Martin, who died in 2003, was found to have paid other Michigan players over several seasons.)

As with Calipari’s UMass and Memphis teams, the Martin scandal erased entire seasons of Michigan basketball from the history books. The school fired its coach, took down its banners from the Final Four, and imposed on itself a wide range of sanctions. As part of a deal with the N.C.A.A., Michigan was forbidden from associating with Webber until last summer. When the Wolverines made the 2013 championship game, after a ten-year absence from the final, all of the Fab Five were in attendance. It was an odd scene—a celebration of a team that, for official purposes, never existed.

All of which makes Webber’s ubiquitous Burger King commercial this year more intriguing, with him wearing what is, for the ad’s purposes, a Michigan jersey—the colors are there, but the school’s name is not. It is partly gratifying to see Webber finally make above-board money from his years at Michigan; in a fairer world, he would have been able to profit directly from the jersey sales that he inspired back in the day. And so this ad is a kind of poke in the eye to the N.C.A.A. But Webber is an unconventional choice for a pitchman: he broke the rules, taking money that was unavailable to his peers, and later he lied about it. The raw deal that college players faced then, and face now, doesn’t absolve him of what he did. But a corrupt system breeds corruption.

Twenty years later, another group of fabulous freshmen are in the Final Four. There are plenty of reasons to root against Kentucky. It is a bit galling to see success come so quickly to a team filled with players who would likely prefer to be playing in the pros. Maybe you don’t want to see Calipari’s farm-system model rewarded yet again. But, if someone beats the Wildcats, it won’t be a win for some older or purer version of college basketball. The other schools in the Final Four are hoping for the same payout; their coaches are already thinking about the next recruiting class. The likes of Calipari and Webber may not be sentimental favorites, but they play clarifying roles in this ongoing drama. It may seem a dubious service, but we could use a dose of the truth.

Photograph by Bob Donnan/USA Today/Reuters.