Right or wrong OP’s thread title is only the SI article title almost verbatim.
It’s true enough that in the short term, when Cal came here, most of the meaningful recruiting he did was to himself personally. Tubby and BCG had kind of killed our brand recognition in that generation. But that’s far from saying we couldn’t come back or our brand didn’t ultimately have value. There was a reason Greg Doyyel wrote that big article at the time “John Calipari and Kentucky Have Merged.” It only took a little bit of kindling to restart that fire precisely because of who we had always been. And once it was restarted it ran wild among journalists and sportscasters, giving Cal way more pull than he’d ever had at Memphis or anywhere else. I don’t blame WCS for being a little too young to appreciate that full picture. (Or, maybe he does appreciate it. I didn’t read the whole article, just enough to see the title theme was SI’s idea, not OP’s.