Matt Jones, whose Kentucky Sports Radio show is often a temperature check for the mood of Big Blue Nation, opened his Monday program with a bit of a pep talk for a fan base that has once again trudged through a season of angst and unmet expectations.
“Come on, this is Kentucky!” Jones said. “And if we lose, I’ll be the first to say that it’s terrible. But come on. It’s Santa (pause) Clara … on some level, you cannot be scared of Santa Clara.”
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A mere four years ago, Kentucky swaggered into the NCAA tournament as a No. 2 seed and one of the betting favorites to win the national championship.
Then the St. Peter’s game happened, sparking a crisis of confidence that spiraled into another shocking tournament loss against Oakland two years later. It would turn out to be the last game John Calipari coached at Kentucky.
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Chasing Calipari out the door and into the arms of SEC rival Arkansas has not solved Kentucky’s problems. Despite a roster that reportedly cost $22 million to put together — a number the school hasn’t bothered much to dispute — the Wildcats tied for seventh in the SEC and are basically an afterthought as a No. 7 seed in this NCAA tournament heading into Friday’s first-round game against Santa Clara.
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Meanwhile, much of Kentucky’s fan base is frustrated with Mark Pope and furious that the man who hired him, outgoing athletic director Mitch Barnhart, is transitioning into an amorphous $950,000 per year university job that smells like a golden parachute.
Oh, and it doesn’t help that Calipari just led Arkansas to its first SEC tournament title since 2000 and the team could be a dark horse to make the Final Four.
“Whatever you think of Cal, when he kind of says, ‘I’m moving the headquarters,’ you don’t want Kentucky to fall off because then it really does look like it was all Cal,” said Drew Franklin, Jones’ co-host, on Monday’s show. “So when he goes and has success, it kind of adds some value to his argument there.”
A year ago, as Arkansas pulled two upsets to make the Sweet 16 in Calipari’s first season, it didn’t register as much of a problem in Kentucky because the Wildcats also advanced to the tournament’s second weekend. But now, faced with the very real possibility of Arkansas making a deep run and Kentucky suffering through an early exit, Big Blue Nation needs to be prepared for the onslaught of told-you-so’s that will inevitably dominate the offseason.
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Calipari, according to some folks who know him well, has privately been amused all season by the drama at Kentucky, the fan base turning on Pope just as it turned on him and the messy departure of an athletic director with whom he had almost no relationship by the end of his tenure.
That’s no surprise. Calipari is endlessly prideful and has a very long memory for disrespect. Even though he ultimately left Kentucky on his own, it wasn’t because he wanted to leave.
John Calipari is 48-22 as the Arkansas Razorbacks’ coach and this year’s team won the SEC tournament title. (Jeff Moreland/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
(Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
But the temptation to take a whack at one of the biggest brands in college basketball for how it handled an all-time great coach is an exercise in rewriting history. If anything, Calipari should thank Kentucky — not just for the tens of millions of dollars he made there but for giving him the motivation to reinvent himself one last time at an age when many of his contemporaries are heading for the exits.
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At age 67, Calipari has gotten himself back in the game.
“So when you’ve done this a long time and you’re in the business of young people, it is about the name on the back of the jersey,” Calipari said Sunday after the SEC championship game, rattling off a list of players he was proud to see play well against Vanderbilt. “That’s what we should be in the business for. You want to win, but it’s the name on the back that I’m in the business for. Now, I’ve kind of been that way and done alright at every school I’ve been at. So you could say it’s wrong, or you can live with it. You can be P’d off or P’d on. I really don’t care.”
That’s about as close to a public middle finger as Calipari is ever going to raise toward Kentucky, where a firestorm would pop up every time he said his goal was getting players drafted into the NBA rather than winning a national championship.
You can understand why Calipari feels his approach has been validated once again. In two years at Arkansas, he’s shown the world he’s still got his touch with five-star recruits like Darius Acuff, the Detroit-raised point guard who is regularly putting up 25-point games and rocketing up draft boards. In Calipari’s world, he’s still the brand those future NBA stars care about. The school is incidental, just as it was at Kentucky and Memphis before that.
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But even if Kentucky fans are going to suffer a little bit as they realize how true that always was, it doesn’t mean they were wrong for souring on Calipari or that he would have been able to do what he’s doing at Arkansas if he’d stayed.
We’ll never know for sure how it might have played out, but what we can say with certainty is that Calipari’s tenure at Kentucky was going the wrong direction. His first 10 years were undeniably great, including the 2012 national championship. But after the COVID season, neither he, nor the program, was ever the same.
Calipari was still attracting great talent in his final years at Kentucky — Cason Wallace, Reed Sheppard and national player of the year Oscar Tshiebwe just to name a few — but the program wasn’t working the way it should have. There were plenty of culprits. A stale assistant coaching staff, administrative dysfunction, players who didn’t really fit the style Calipari preferred to play.
But at the end of the day, Calipari established a standard at Kentucky that he did not meet over his final four seasons. It was, quite simply and organically, the right time for a divorce.
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Only Calipari can answer whether he got complacent after signing an $86 million “lifetime contract” with Kentucky in 2019, shortly after a dalliance with UCLA. But in retrospect, that was the moment he should have bolted.
At a school like Kentucky, where basketball is religion, the expectations are unreasonable and the off-court demands are never ending, a decade as the head coach is like 20 anywhere else. Calipari knew when he took the job there would be a shelf life. He just couldn’t bring himself to leave the place behind when he was still relatively on top.
Getting the chance to start over with a new challenge and a bit of a chip on his shoulder was exactly what Calipari needed as he hit his mid-60s. From afar, he looks like he’s having fun again in a way that just didn’t seem possible anymore at Kentucky, where people stopped laughing at his jokes and tuned out all the basketball homilies they had heard too many times before.
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Sometimes, for the sake of everyone involved, it just needs to end. The Calipari-Big Blue marriage ran its course.
That won’t be the narrative if Kentucky’s season ends in another March disaster on Friday and Arkansas goes on to a deep tournament run. But it will be the truth, no matter how much Kentucky fans are told they should have seller’s remorse.
