The devil walked into church.

He goes every morning, no matter what town he’s in. It’s part of his daily routine, and the devil loves his routines. This church is in an odd location, across the street from a tattoo parlor in Colorado Springs. A motorcycle peeled out as we pulled in. On the way here, as the sun rose in the east, we drove past the golden red rocks of the Garden of the Gods in the high desert, arriving just moments after mass had begun.

“Are you Catholic?” he asked me quietly as we crossed the threshold.

No, I told him. I am not.

His eyes lit up mischievously. “We’ll get excommunicated if you take communion!”

John Calipari, the head basketball coach at the University of Kentucky, didn’t want me to come to church with him. I had to ask, again and again and again. He’s an old-school Catholic from a Pennsylvania steel town, private with his faith, and his unease was palpable. I even offered to wait outside. But at the last moment, he said I could join him. It wasn’t just penitence that held him back; if anything it was the opposite. The devil never wants to be seen as too pious. He never wants his players—especially his future players—to see him as a fraud.

“I’m still uncomfortable bringing you,” Calipari told me. “You want to put that in there? Okay. Just say this: When you really sin a lot, you go to mass every day." He laughed. “That’s why I go to mass.”

Atonement seems to be on his mind a lot these days. Calipari, after all, was once considered the most hated man in college basketball, and depending on whom you ask, he still is. He’s the kind of coach whose obsession with winning is matched only by an alacrity to exploit the rules in his favor. It’s almost Belichickian.

He is also a pioneer—the man who popularized the idea of one-and-dones that has diffused throughout college basketball. When he was hired at Kentucky in 2009, Calipari immediately signed the top recruiting class in the country. His promise to star players was simple: In exchange for one season in Lexington, he would do everything in his power to put them on the path to NBA success. One year. That’s it.

In the holier-than-thou world of collegiate athletics, Calipari’s brazen attempt to game the system was, at the time, considered sacrilege. His detractors—like Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski, the most celebrated coach in college hoops, and Rick Pitino, Calipari’s cross-state nemesis at Louisville—suggested that Kentucky didn’t do things the right way. In their eyes, the Wildcats weren’t even a college basketball program anymore. Kentucky was an NBA factory.

Fast-forward to today, as the NCAA is roiled in a corruption scandal that threatens to upend the sport. It’s one thing when a coach is accused of breaking NCAA rules; it’s quite another when four coaches are indicted on federal charges, as was the case last year. Meanwhile, the one-and-done model is everywhere—including, notably, at Duke. What was once a revolutionary practice for an elite collegiate coach is now standard issue. Kentucky even won a national championship in 2012, but this season, the Wildcats have had their struggles as the youngest team in the country, despite being stacked with future NBA players. At the center of the college basketball typhoon is Calipari, who suddenly finds himself as one of the most prominent faces of a system under scrutiny, and as a progressive visionary who sees the NCAA’s attachment to antiquated and exploitative ideals of amateurism as its own kind of scam.