There shouldn’t be a week more absent of controversy and more straightforward in celebration than the one in which you’re being inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame, but the norm has never been John Calipari’s thing.

There are 10 other basketball greats who are being inducted into the Hall Friday night, but none of them have drawn as much attention in recent days — both positive and negative — as the current frontman for Kentucky basketball.

For 26 seasons (23 of which have been spent in the college ranks), Coach Cal has consistently done things the way everyone said he couldn’t. Or at least the way he shouldn’t.

His contentious attitude at UMass quickly drew the ire of other head coaches in the region, most memorably Temple’s John Chaney, who threatened to kill Calipari during a postgame press conference in 1994. Then there was an ill-advised jump to the NBA, where he was unsuccessful both on and off the court. His return to college has been characterized largely by the controversy surrounding his willingness to rely on players who spend just one season in college before turning professional. Then, most infamously, there are his 1996 and 2008 Final Four banners, which have been taken down at UMass and Memphis, respectively, after the discovery of NCAA violations.

The time for letting bygones be bygones has apparently not come quite yet at Memphis, where plans to honor Calipari and his Hall-of-Fame induction were scrapped earlier this week after Tiger fans expressed their outrage. UMass, for its part, is holding firm with its own plans to honor Calipari in December.

The split is a microcosm of the overall view on Calipari who has made Kentucky the name in college basketball by churning out NBA Draft picks (24 in six years) and Final Four appearances (four in six years) at a previously unheard of rate.

The top-ranked recruiting classes, the No. 1 rankings, the unprecedented amount of NBA Draft picks and, most recently, the pursuit of perfection — it’s all led to an increasingly popular notion that Kentucky is the hoops equivalent of Nick Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide. The rightful ruler of the hardwood ready to take the baton from its SEC brethren once the final whistle blows in mid-January.

But few things in college basketball are as straightforward as they are in the world of its gridiron counterpart, and Big Blue Nation’s claim to Alabama’s — they of three national championships in the last six seasons — duplicate throne is no different.

Kentucky has received No. 1 votes in each of the last three preseason coaches and Associated Press Top-25 polls (a trend that will likely continue next month), and has started the last two season as both set of voters’ pick to cut down the nets at the end of the year. In those three seasons, the Wildcats have lost in the first round of the NIT, been a No. 8 seed that advanced all the way to the title game before losing to a No. 7 seed, and become the first team in college basketball history to start a season 38-0 before bowing out in the national semifinals.

It’s a résumé so eccentric that it forces us to call into question not just how we view this era of UK basketball, but how we view success and dominance and, yes, “dynasties” for the whole of the sport.

If it’s just about winning the end of the year tournament, then Connecticut’s done that twice in the last five years, and three times since 2004. Duke, the reigning national champions, have also cut down the nets twice since 2010, and three times since 2001. John Calipari has brought just one championship home to Lexington, a fact which, fairly or unfairly, gets discussed in the city more and more with each passing day that the fan base becomes further removed from April 2, 2012.

With this being the current landscape of the sport, why is Calipari the man we all seem most fascinated by, the man we seem most willing to direct our attention towards?

The easy answer is four Final Fours in six seasons and the ability to churn out lottery picks at a rate no one knew was possible as recently as a decade ago. The more convoluted answer is that the sport of college basketball itself is in the middle of a period that remains equal parts fascinating and peculiar, and the Wildcats are the era’s fascinating and peculiar champion.

We aren’t all that far removed from a time when landing a blue chip basketball recruit came hand-in-hand with a three- or four-year pass to watch the young man develop and hopefully put himself in a position to become a pro. As such, program stability was much easier to attain. Land one or two great recruiting classes, be a national title contender for six or seven years. The struggle for success in college hoops had little to do with deciphering the formula.

We are now more than a decade removed from the final vestiges of that era, and firmly entrenched in one where re-learning the rosters of the sport’s power programs has become an exercise on par with the one demanded of hardcore Major League Baseball fans each spring. Basketball’s top amateur talent no longer remains amateur talent for any longer than it has to, which makes every recruiting season a do-or-die time frame for the bulk of the game’s most well-known coaches. There are no stars in the sport anymore, because the biggest boon that comes with attaining modern stardom has become the guarantee of a forthcoming professional contract, so long as you can go five or six weeks without getting hurt.

Success is no longer kin with consistency, a fact best showcased by the recent struggles of the programs who have attained the sport’s top prize.

Since the expansion of the NCAA Tournament, there have been just six national champions that have failed to qualify for the big dance the next season. Four of those six occurrences have taken place in the last eight years — Florida in 2008, North Carolina in 2010, Kentucky in 2013 and Connecticut last season.

That said, it boggles the right brain to think that the program that has showcased the most high-level consistency over this period has also been the one with the most consistently overwhelming turnover from one season to the next.

The predictable allegations of cheating from rival fans that have accompanied Kentucky’s recent success have always seemed ridiculous given the recruiting pitch that’s currently in place: Come spend eight or nine months in this city that cares about what you do more than it cares about anything else, be treated like a God during this time, play in national spotlight games, get talked about on ESPN a lot, make a run at a championship, then leave and become a millionaire. Don’t believe me? Look at all these guys who were in your shoes these last few years and went on to follow the exact path I just laid out.

Suddenly, Kentucky’s consistent success under Calipari and the nation’s fascination with it becomes much easier to understand.

The Calipari era in Lexington has been loaded with firsts. First program to produce 15 first-round draft picks in five years. First program to bring in five consecutive top-ranked recruiting classes. First team to earn a preseason No. 1 ranking the year after missing the tournament entirely. First program to produce the No. 1 and No. 2 draft pick in the same year. First program since Duke (1990-94) to make four Final Four appearances in five years. First team to start a season 38-0.

Calipari has also become the first Kentucky head coach, at least in the modern era, to not just embrace UK’s deep-rooted tradition, but to try and combat it.

In 2012, just months after Calipari had brought Wildcat fans their eighth national championship, he wrote the following on his website:

Big Blue Nation, it’s time we learn and come to grips with the fact that we are not a traditional program. We haven’t been one for the last three years, and going forward, this will continue to be a nontraditional program.

The 25-year-old model doesn’t work anymore. It is done and blown up. We are going by our own model now: the gold standard. Everyone has to accept that.

That same offseason, Calipari ended Kentucky’s series with regional rival Indiana, whom the team has played at least once in every season since 1969. UK also temporarily cut its series with fellow national powerhouse North Carolina, whom they had played every season for the previous 12, and announced that they would not be playing a game inside Louisville’s Freedom Hall for the first time since 1958.

Both coaching and playing at Kentucky are unlike doing the same thing anywhere else in America. Big Blue Nation treats the last man on its bench like an NBA All-Star. If you wear that jersey, if you warm up on that court, you are a certified celebrity in the city of Lexington, and remain as such forever. Tradition is sacred at Kentucky. Unless, like Calipari, you’re successful and endearing enough to create your own.

The debate and controversy surrounding Calipari’s merits as a Hall of Famer won’t end once he becomes an official member Friday night, and he knows that. He also doesn’t care. Ultimately, the argument comes down to what your standard for inclusion into this fraternity should be. If it’s at least more than one championship and an uncontroversial track record, then maybe this whole thing is a bit premature. If it’s an emphasis on the word “fame,” however, then the debate ends right there.

Regardless of how you feel about him, it would be impossible to tell the story of college basketball in the modern era without focusing a large amount of time on John Calipari, and that’s probably the biggest reason why he’ll be spending this weekend in a gold jacket.