In early September, John Calipari posted a video in which he led a tour of the “Wildcat Coal Lodge,” a brand new dormitory at the University of Kentucky built specifically for the use of Calipari’s men’s basketball team. The dorm was unlike any I could remember from college: flat-screen TVs in almost every corner, a lounge with a pool table, free Gatorade twenty-four hours a day. A woman named Aunt Betsy guarded the entrance to the “new gold standard in housing,” and during the tour Calipari asked the dorm’s head chef if he could make a grilled cheese, a hamburger, a cheesesteak, and wings. The answer to each request was yes, which might not make the team’s nutritionist happy, but would presumably excite the video’s primary audience: seventeen-year-old basketball phenoms trying to decide where to go to college. Calipari showed off one player’s room, dotted with multiple couches and another large flat-screen—there are no roommates in the Wildcat Coal Lodge—then walked over to the sink, which was slightly too tall, and proclaimed, “Everything in here is for seven-footers.”

The video was frantically e-mailed among fans of other major college programs. Here, it seemed, was evidence that the end times had arrived: our teams were doomed. I grew up a fan of the Kansas Jayhawks, a team with one of the most storied traditions in all of college basketball. In 2008, they beat Memphis, then coached by Calipari, in the championship game. Last year, they met Calipari in the final again, but lost. The point is, things have been going pretty well for the Jayhawks, but after I sent the dorm tour to a fellow Kansas diehard, his reply was filled with dismay: “If you were serious about playing basketball, why would you not go to Kentucky?”

Answer: for the most part, you do. The Wildcats, who play Duke Tuesday night, enter this season ranked third in the nation, a remarkable feat given that they are the only team in major-conference basketball that does not return a single starter. All five members of last year’s starting lineup left early for the N.B.A. draft, including the top two picks. Hardly a worry for Calipari: this year, his freshman class includes Nerlens Noel, the top recruit in the country, and Calipari has already signed three of the top six players in next year’s graduating class. It is not especially difficult to recruit to Kentucky, the most successful program in college-basketball history, but before he arrived the Wildcats had fallen on lean times, missing the N.C.A.A. tournament for the first time in twenty years. Since then, Calipari has won more games than any coach in the country.

More on Calipari the coach in a second. First, one has to address the fact that he has turned the work of head coach into less of a master class in defensive positioning—though there is that—than a full-on effort to market his program and his players. Other coaches try to do this, or have watched Calipari and realize they need to do it, but none do it as well. Calipari hosts his own Web site, updated constantly by a full-time employee, and never misses an opportunity to post photos of himself with celebrities who might impress a teen-ager. (ESPN recently detailed an encounter Calipari had with Charlie Sheen, including Calipari’s glee at finding out that Sheen has eight million Twitter followers to whom he might promote a photo of them that Calipari had tweeted.) Jay-Z, Drake, and LeBron James have all made recent appearances in the Kentucky locker room. At first, Calipari asked them to come; now it’s the other way around. When Kentucky hosted its first “practice” of the season, a glorified pep rally known as Big Blue Madness, there were few drills that might resemble anything like skill development, but plenty of pyrotechnics. (Deadspin reported that the athletic department spent as much on lighting for the event as Kentucky’s football team is allotted for its entire recruiting budget.) Broadcast by ESPN, the practice was an unpaid ad for the program, to go along with “All-Access Kentucky,” a miniseries in which Calipari had allowed ESPN to trail his team with cameras. He says the show was meant simply to promote his players as more than just athletes. Of course, promoting them at all makes it easy for recruits to see that they, too, will be promoted.

But the biggest misconception about Calipari is that all of this is somehow detrimental to the game—that his success is cancerous and dirty. He admits that, like any coach trying to curry favor with future millionaires, he is not squeaky clean: twice he has had Final Four appearances vacated, first when it was revealed that one of his players had accepted money from an agent, then when another submitted fraudulent S.A.T. scores. These are clear violations of N.C.A.A. regulations intended to maintain the sanctity of amateur athletics, an industry with revenues in the billions, and, as such, Calipari is certainly bad for the institution of college basketball as practiced over many decades. But he does not do badly by his top players, and the violations above are not breaches of Calipari’s own stated goal: getting young men paid to play the game of basketball.

What Calipari has done is turn his basketball program into a place that, like a law, business, dental, or other professional school, is focussed on insuring that each of its students moves on to successful, satisfying careers. In this regard, Calipari is the most honest man in the sport. In 2002, when he was coaching at Memphis, Calipari called his freshman star Dajuan Wagner into his office, tore up his scholarship, and said he couldn’t come back. Wagner was ready for the pros, Calipari said, and keeping him around in an unpaid capacity would only be selfish. (That story has a sad ending: Wagner flamed out after just four years in the league, and, in hindsight, Calipari might have done better to keep him around for a year or two of extra training—quite aside from the question of getting a degree.) Every starter Calipari has coached at Kentucky has been drafted—one wall of the Wildcat Coal Lodge is devoted entirely to photos of former Kentucky players in the N.B.A.—and Mitch McConnell, one of the state’s senators, joked that Calipari was “turning out more millionaires than a Wall Street firm.”

Last Friday, Kentucky played Maryland at the Barclays Center. It was a close game, but it was also clear which team was stacked with raw talent that would mature as the season progressed: the Wildcats start three freshman and two sophomores, just as they did last year in winning the national championship. This was the team’s first time in the barely-a-month-old Barclays Center, but not Calipari’s: he had come for Jay-Z’s first concert at the new arena, in late September. “This is where the stage was,” Calipari said in a video he posted before Friday’s game. When Jay-Z visited the Kentucky locker room last season, he was fined fifty thousand dollars for entering a college locker room as an N.B.A. owner. He rapped about the fine on his newest album, “Watch the Throne,” which can be heard playing in the background of the Wildcat Coal Lodge video. The relationship has been beneficial for both men, but more so to Calipari, who is able to connect his program with a man many of his players hold as an icon. “I told Jay-Z that I might get fined $50k for being in HIS locker room tonight,” Calipari tweeted before the concert, making sure to include Jay-Z’s reply: “I got you.”