John Calipari quotes Lil Wayne to deliver NIL message

John Calipari is living out Lil Wayne’s mantra when it comes to his handling of Kentucky basketball’s NIL situation. If that sentence sounds made up, it’s hard to blame you, but it was a real storyline coming out of Coach Cal’s first press conference since March.

Of course, NIL has been a massive topic of discussion of late. And while Kentucky was getting it players signed to NIL deals — such as a nationally televised AT&T commercial during March Madness — there really hasn’t been much information leaked about those deals, who they’re with and how much they’re worth.

When asked about the unknown nature of NIL deals at Kentucky and across the country, Calipari simply pulled out a line from a song that Lil’ Wayne had shared with him when the two met up back at the end of April. So take a listen to John Calipari’s best attempt to compare a Lil’ Wayne lyric to his approach on NIL:

You can read his full comments on the issue below

John Calipari: ‘real G’s stay silent like lasagna’

“Name, Image and Likeness, I’m not going to share everything we do, because it’s a competitive advantage here. Now, the reason I’m not sharing because I got a lot of people, coaches — ‘How are you doing it? What are you guys doing?’ By coming here, if you’re a terrific player, what’s added to your value is being at Kentucky.

“Lil’ Wayne said to me — if you don’t mind me dropping a name — he said ‘I like how you just keep it in-house, what you do and and everybody.’ He said ‘it’s like my lyric: real G’s stay silent like lasagna.’ Now, I have no idea what that means but he gave it to me and said ‘you need to roll with that.'”

The actual lyric — from Wayne’s topically-named Tha Carter IV song “6 foot 7 foot” — says, “real G’s move in silence like lasagna,” and basically means that real gangsters move in silence like the letter g in the word lasagna. But that’s close enough for an old fella like Coach Cal. After that, he explained why that lyric applies to his NIL approach:

“And so, I’m not, we’re not, going to be in the business of sharing all the stuff that we’re doing here. So there will be things that are said, some of them are right, most of them are wrong, but that’s fine. I’m not going to respond to it. All our kids, we got the No. 1 recruiting class in the country. It didn’t happen if we’re not on top of what we’re doing.

“But I’m going to say it again, even with NIL, I do not want to be in transactional. I want it to be transformational, where it’s about educating. Our kids have gotten involved in communities, in charity. Obviously, when you’re educating, you’re trying to say ‘here’s what compounding interest does, here’s what investing at an early age does.’ Or you can just spend it all and have nothing. So it’s more than just we are doing this for you and I want you to do this for me.”