Around the state of Kentucky this week, the water cooler speculation has centered almost entirely on the reception John Calipari will receive Saturday night when he walks into Rupp Arena wearing the Arkansas Razorbacks logo.
Nearly 10 months after one of the most awkward sports divorces in recent memory — one that has, to this point, worked out far better for Kentucky than its former coach of 15 seasons — even Calipari does not expect to be welcomed warmly right now.
“My guess is I’m going to get booed,” Calipari said this week on his weekly radio show, with a sarcastic laugh that betrayed his discomfort. “But that’s all part of it. Shoot, you get booed. I’ve done this so long, I’ll tell ya, I’ve got bazooka holes in my body. So when you shoot arrows, it doesn’t even hit skin. But it’ll be interesting. Can’t say I’m looking forward to it. I’m looking forward to coaching, but to walk in, the vibe, I don’t know how I’m going to take it to be honest with you.”
But there’s one big reason why Kentucky fans should try their best to be magnanimous, and it has nothing to do with the 2012 national championship he brought them or the four Final Four trips or all the NBA stars of the Calipari era who are forever associated with Kentucky.
If Calipari had simply returned for his 16th season, Kentucky would not be ranked No. 12 and enjoying its Era of Good Feelings under Mark Pope, who has leaned all the way into the unique and sometimes overheated relationship between this basketball program and Big Blue Nation.
Instead, Kentucky would look almost exactly like Arkansas does now: A team languishing at 1-6 in the SEC, almost certain to miss the NCAA men’s tournament, with a defiantly aloof coach trying to stave off a nuclear meltdown the likes of which college basketball has never seen.
“If he was having that year here,” said Matt Jones, host of the thermometer-setting Kentucky Sports Radio show, “it would have been the worst thing. It would have been ugly and awful for everyone involved. It would have been a terrible, terrible scene. So it was best for everybody that did not happen.”
It is, however, the unavoidable sliding doors moment that took place on the afternoon of April 7 when word began to circulate around the Final Four in Phoenix that Calipari had legitimate interest in leaving Kentucky for Arkansas.
A lot of people, even some close to Kentucky, didn’t really believe it. Though 2024 had ended in another tournament debacle, with the Wildcats losing to No. 14 seed Oakland in the first round, Calipari wasn’t getting fired. Despite four years of stagnation, frustration and a growing sense around the program that it was just over, Kentucky wasn’t going to pay his $35 million buyout and Calipari wasn’t going to quit.
After a few days of uncertainty following the end of Kentucky’s season, Calipari and athletics director Mitch Barnhart had sat down for a joint interview that made clear he was coming back. It seemed definitive.
And even if Coach Cal was going to leave … Arkansas? A program that had been a rung or two down on the college basketball hierarchy? Another SEC school, ensuring he’d have to visit Rupp Arena every other year?
On the surface, it didn’t make sense. But a few hours after the rumors emerged, the deal was done.
Almost immediately, Kentucky fans knew two things: First, that everyone from current players to recruits to longtime staff members would be going with him — a completely clean break with the Calipari era. But also that his shadow would lurk in the background as long as he stayed at Arkansas, every game a reminder of the team and program Calipari would have had at Kentucky.
All of that comes to roost on Saturday. Among Arkansas’ regular nine-man rotation (including injured freshman point guard Boogie Fland), three played at Kentucky last year and three were committed to Kentucky. There would have been some differences on the margins, but it’s essentially the same team Calipari would have put on the floor if he had stayed at Kentucky.
That alone illustrates why he had to leave.
And now, less than a year into his tenure, the utter failure of this season at Arkansas is raising questions around college basketball about whether this experiment is going to work at all.
There aren’t a lot of excuses for why Arkansas is this mediocre, ranked outside the top 50 in the KenPom.com efficiency ratings with an offense that was No. 100 nationally as of Thursday.
It doesn’t help that the SEC is tougher than ever, with a strong possibility that 12 or 13 teams could get NCAA tournament bids.
But the allure of Calipari, just as it was for Kentucky in 2009 when they poached him from Memphis, has always been his ability to fix programs with an immediate talent infusion. Arkansas spared no expense, either on Calipari ($7 million per year) or the roster. In addition to the players Calipari brought from Kentucky, he added senior big man Jonas Aidoo, who started for Tennessee last year, and fifth-year guard Johnell Davis, who was a huge factor in Florida Atlantic’s run to the Final Four two years ago.
It is, by and large, the team Calipari wanted. It’s just not working, much to the surprise of a state and a booster class that forked over millions of dollars because it viewed Calipari as immediate entry to higher status in the basketball ecosystem.
‘We live in a ‘fix it right now’ world, and Cal knows it and that fan base knows it,” said analyst Jimmy Dykes, who will call Saturday’s game for ESPN and has strong connections to Arkansas where he played in the early 1980s. “He was hired with the expectation that ‘We’re going to win right now,’ and it hasn’t gone that way.
“They have individual pieces that are good players. Those pieces have not fit nearly as well as they have to fit at this level. I think there is surprise, almost shock, that this is where they are.”
If Arkansas loses Saturday and plays out the rest of this season on its current trajectory, there will be a strong impulse to write off the Arkansas-Calipari marriage as a failure — and a lot of glee from the majority of Kentucky’s fan base that had tired of him by the end.
It’s probably too early for that. As ESPN’s Fran Fraschilla said, Arkansas has commitments from a pair of top-10 guards in Meleek Thomas and Darius Acuff Jr., who are “better than anyone on the roster right now.” Given Arkansas’ large NIL war chest, the Razorbacks will no doubt be among the country’s most talented teams for the foreseeable future.
And according to one person close with Calipari, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on his behalf, there is no chance he would walk away — not this year or anytime soon. His ego simply wouldn’t allow it, and the financial incentives to stay are too great.
But how long will Arkansas’ patience last?
The issue for Calipari, who turns 66 in the next couple weeks, is that the Arkansas experience so far has been a slightly exaggerated mirror image of what doomed him in his final years at Kentucky.
Rosters that didn’t fit together. Highly touted freshmen who didn’t live up to their billing. Lack of shooting and playmaking skill, making it difficult to pull the offense out of the mud. Not enough answers or accountability from the head coach, particularly after first-round NCAA upsets to Oakland last year and Saint Peter’s in 2022.
That’s why it frustrates Jones when media members or former coaches don’t understand why the reaction Saturday in Rupp Arena is likely to be mixed at best, even though Kentucky fans right now are thrilled with how it’s turned out.
“I don’t think you can underplay it — the performance was down, but the relationship was terrible,” Jones said. “He skipped media appearances, he skipped postgame shows, he talked down (to the fans) a lot. The relationship was so bad at the end, it was a lot more than just games. I think he started to see the fan base as the enemy, or at least portions of the fan base. And I think it made him lose what he was so good at for so long, which was really connecting.”
That will change one day. Jones expects Calipari to eventually get a warm embrace from Big Blue Nation, just as Rick Pitino did earlier this year when Pope brought him to Midnight Madness. All of the acrimony from Pitino’s exit to the Boston Celtics in 1997 and his subsequent years as the enemy at Louisville melted away.
Calipari’s achievements in his first decade at Kentucky ensure the relationship won’t be bad forever. But Saturday could very well be ugly for him on the court and in his soul, where deep down he understands that it got stale in Lexington and he stayed a few years too long.
The question now is whether it’s too late in Calipari’s career and his life to rekindle the fire that made him college basketball’s most feared coach. If so, Kentucky got luckier than it deserved, and Arkansas is simply the new Kentucky, stuck between hoping he has another run in him but fearful his best days are definitively in the past.
This post appeared first on USA TODAY
