Goals at Kentucky were even too big for Calipari
Moon grad reportedly taking the job at Arkansas
John Calipari is set to be introduced as the head men’s basketball coach at Arkansas. I would say he took the money and ran but he is actually taking a slight pay cut to leave his “dream job” at Kentucky to go to Arkansas.
Calipari, a Moon grad, is one of the biggest names in college basketball coaching. He is one of the biggest personalities, too, and he is one of the few coaches deemed big enough for the Kentucky job.
And yet, as it turns out, maybe he wasn’t big enough for the job.
That is at least the way it looks right now but I would argue Calipari at one point was indeed big enough for the job but the job chewed him up and spit him out.
The expectations at Kentucky are enormous, possibly even unrealistic, but that’s life at one of the real (not fake or fading) blue blood programs in the country. Kentucky is at worst the second best job in the country behind or equal to North Carolina and as such as good as Calipari is and was, it wasn’t good enough.
Calipari did lead Kentucky to the 2012 national championship and three other Final Fours so he had the program rolling from his arrival in 2009 until about 2019. He won the SEC regular season title and SEC tournament six times each but then he just sort of lost his way.
One of his greatest strengths — recruiting — might actually have also been his biggest liability in the post-COVID era of college basketball. Calipari brought a boat load of fivestar hot shots to Lexington and 20 years ago that probably would have been a model for winning at a high level.
But college basketball has changed dramatically and recruiting is different as the best teams seem to be compromised of transfers and older players.
Calipari’s hot shot freshmen have been sent home early in the NCAA tournament by teams like Oakland, who had a 6th-year senior throwing in 3-pointers from the parking lot.
That has been one issue, however, he has had some teams with more experience — like the one that got knocked out by St. Peters in 2022.
That’s why even though Calipari has produced 35 first-round picks (for comparison’s sake Kentucky has 58 total, which means well more than half came in Calipari’s 15 seasons), he hasn’t produced results that are commiserate with that kind of talent.
Yes, he has compiled a nice resume when you consider he had seven trips to the Elite Eight, the four Final Fours and one national title in 15 seasons but his recent five seasons have not been good enough.
He has only won one NCAA tournament game since 2019. He won the SEC in the COVID year or 2020 but other than that he hasn’t won the conference or the conference tournament for the last five seasons.
One could surmise that his first 10 seasons earned him the benefit of the doubt but that’s not always how it works. Calipari’s latest flame out in the NCAA tournament might have actually got him fired except his buyout was in excess of $30 million and Kentucky couldn’t afford it (or didn’t want to pay that much).
At that point it was clear Calipari needed to find a way out before he had to endure the embarrassment of being fired. It was time and it was especially time considering much of his support among the fan base and key donors and alums had waned.
Calipari found his life preserver at Arkansas and jumped out of the boat to grab it. There is no question these next five seasons will be to preserve his legacy as a Hall of Fame coach, make one more run at a national championship and maybe even stick it to the portion of Kentucky’s fan base he thinks didn’t appreciate what he did enough.
Here is the thing that should be crystal clear, however, and that is a place like Kentucky is not easy to coach at. Yes they have all the resources, the history, the tradition, the fan base, the brand name, the recruiting power etc., etc. but it also comes with expectations that are unusually high and likely unrealistic.
In the end, Calipari just couldn’t keep up with the expectations and in recent years he has been described as checked out, burned out and miserable and that isn’t how it is supposed to be. Calipari has aged significantly from when he took the job and that has as much to do with the stress and constant expectations as him aging 15 years.
Maybe there is just a shelf life for any coach that takes a job at a place like Kentucky because long, sustained winning at a high level is really hard. Again, Calipari recruited better than just about anyone who has ever done it when you look at the five-star players and firstround picks he has brought in and yet he wasn’t able to continue to win at a level acceptable to most in the Kentucky basketball community.
I happen to think it is going to be difficult for Calipari to build Arkansas into anything close to what his early years at Kentucky were. I also wonder if he is going to be able to adjust the way he recruits to meet the challenges of this new world of transfer portal players dominating the NCAA tournament.
Calipari is a Hall of Famer for a reason, he has six Final Fours across three different programs and has won 800plus games. But now he finds himself in the awkward position of starting over and fighting to keep his lofty status as one of the power coaches in the game despite the fact he is 65 and should be thinking about retirement.
Kentucky was supposed to be his dream job and he was supposedly the perfect coach. It was a power couple marriage that worked but like most power couples it was inevitably destined to end well short of happily ever after.