A one-take post on the theoretical John Calipari/Kentucky divorce
Live from my kitchen at 7 AM
This was not a planned post, but sometimes the college basketball season and/or offseason throws such a huge wrench in one’s plans that the only choice is to deviate. Per several media members (I’m not bothering to see who had it first, but it seems like an Arkansas guy did), John Calipari is very likely to be the next head coach at Arkansas.
Let me type that again: John Calipari is going to be the next head coach at Arkansas. I could type that 50 times and it would still look very, very weird. No matter what happens tonight in the actual title game, the biggest story in the sport from now through November is going to be the strangest marriage the sport has seen in decades. I can’t promise to tell you that it will or won’t work. I can’t promise to tell you that it will or won’t work for the divorced here in Kentucky.
But! I feel compelled to put something up about it. This one-take post has no edits, and is strictly what I feel is happening here for both sides.
The fallout for Kentucky
If you look strictly upon the last 4-5 years, Kentucky wins the divorce. I am no expert in these as I’ve been pretty lucky in my own life, but inasmuch as a winner ‘exists’ I think you have to lean towards Kentucky.
Kentucky just got rid of a coach they did not want.
Without paying his $33M buyout. Those two must go together, because there is no other way for them to go. If John Calipari’s buyout was $15M, he would not have made it this long as the Kentucky head coach. He may have been fired after last year. He certainly wouldn’t have stayed the head coach after this year, in which Kentucky lost to 14-seed Oakland almost entirely of their own hubris and bluster. (That post is still coming, by the way. I need time to get it right.) My personal read of the Kentucky fanbase post-Oakland was that roughly 75-80% of them would have been thrilled to enter 2024-25 without him on the sidelines. That’s not an environment in which you can run it back, even though we have seen something similar work when Michigan didn’t fire Jim Harbaugh. However: entirely different sport, entirely different people, and frankly, entirely different situations.
Post-COVID Cal =/= pre-COVID Cal. This is an obvious one. Here are Cal’s pre-COVID numbers at Kentucky:
And the post-COVID numbers.
Almost steadily, you can see Calipari’s focus on defense waning. He re-designed the defense in the mid-2010s, pushed it to perfection with the 38-1 team, kept things going up through the PJ Washington/Tyler Herro era, and then…that was basically it.
Plus, those final results, even if you’re a KenPom hater for some reason, aren’t the Kentucky Standard™. Like it or not, Kentucky fans enter every season believing they should be one of the five best teams in the nation. For a long, long time under Calipari, that belief was rewarded. Between 2010 and 2019, 10 seasons in all, Kentucky was one of the eight best teams in America eight times. In the last five seasons, they’ve done it once. What was once the Gold Standard isn’t such anymore.
Plus, there were obvious bleeding cracks in the Calipari facade. As any Kentucky fan will tell you, he spent this entire season begging fans to Wait Until March, only for them to flop on the biggest stage of the season as all of his treasured, perfect freshmen wilted in the spotlight. In the postgame Calipari openly wondered if you can still win titles with super-young teams in the new era of college basketball, which, buddy, welcome to 2021.
I have a post in the chamber titled “On Kentucky’s hubris,” which will get up eventually. But it mostly boils down to the following: this year more than any other in the modern Calipari era, Kentucky entered games with the laziest, most bored gameplans I had ever seen from any Kentucky staff. This includes the late Tubby years, this includes Billy Clyde. You can bear this out in the data, by the way. Shot Quality will tell you that Kentucky’s shot selection was awful this year. They’ll also tell you that arguably the most talented team in America overcame it by way of being arguably the most talented team in America.
I think that this is probably the best realistic outcome that was left on the table for Calipari and Kentucky. It’s absolutely a possibility that if he were on the sidelines for 2024-25, Kentucky would snap back into being a top-8 team nationally behind what would be a super-talented roster yet again. They would have a brighter future than the Harbaugh comparison appeared to have in August 2021, after all.
The problem for me is obvious: what about the last five years, and what about Kentucky’s actions post-Oakland in which they brought back every piece of the staff that lost to Oakland suggested any desire whatsoever to make the necessary changes, such as a Harbaugh did?
The fallout for Arkansas
This is not my place to discuss how poorly the Arkansas search went, with the Hogs basically stumbling backwards into hiring Calipari. Search “Curry Hicks Sage” on Twitter/X and listen to his #SearchSZN spaces from last night - it’s the best summary of all of this I know of.
And now, the case for why Arkansas is the winner of the divorce. Even if I don’t totally believe it.
Almost for free, Arkansas just got one of the winningest coaches in the history of college basketball. That alone is undisputed. The W-L total itself is impressive, but consider this: only four coaches since 2000 have won more NCAA Tournament games than John Calipari’s 46. Only two of them (Bill Self, Tom Izzo) are still coaching. The number of opportunities you get in life to get that type of guy on your sidelines are very small.
John Calipari had clearly run out of desire and heart at Kentucky, and at a new location with vested booster interest, he’ll be back to pre-COVID Cal. This one requires some convincing, but hey. I understand its status as a divisive product, but I love Kentucky Sports Radio. Adore it. In terms of a cross-section of a fanbase, it’s probably as good as you’re going to get. And for the last month everyone who took the mic there agreed that Cal was quiet quitting. The gameplans were weak. The excuses were weaker. It wasn’t the same Cal. Host Matt Jones said “I’m not sure he’ll find that again here.” That doesn’t mean Cal can’t find it again ever. Year One at Arkansas, one of our nation’s best basketball fanbases, could be just the rejuvenation the guy needs.
This gives Calipari a chance to build an entirely new staff…if he chooses to. And he should. Son Brad has been rising through the ranks in his own way and will presumably be on the staff. Mostly, Calipari needs to be willing to ditch the poor, middling assistant hires he kept falling for over the last few years and swing big. If he’s smart, he’ll hire Ryan Pannone off of Alabama’s staff. He could hire a sitting low-major D1 coach with SEC experience. When you have the money an Arkansas has, anything is reasonably on the table.
I also think this is a great time to talk about Arkansas’s own divorce. Eric Musselman left for USC after just five years at Arkansas. Five years is also the longest Eric Musselman has stayed at a job in his 35-year career. The magic had run out there, and Lyle Lanley had to find a new monorail to get out of town on, so he found one.
Calipari enters without having to do any of the truly hard work. Pre-Muss, Arkansas hadn’t seen a second weekend in the NCAA Tournament in nearly 25 years. He got them there by Year Two, took them to a pair of Elite Eights, and constantly paid off some weaker November-January outings with tremendous Februarys and Marches. It almost sounds like the guy Arkansas is about to hire circa 2019.
Actually, maybe both schools won here. Kentucky gets to make the biggest hire they’ve made since 2009 without having to pay $33M to get rid of their current coach. Arkansas pays $0, if what I’ve read is accurate, to hire a championship-winning coach in desperate need of a career reset with only a few years of on-court action left in him. Maybe this can work out.
No grand conclusion statement here. Instead, here’s my list of Kentucky candidates in rough order. Dan Hurley’s not saying yes, get a grip.
Scott Drew, Baylor. This is sort of a running joke at Kentucky among Kentucky fans but hell, if he says yes you’ve probably upgraded the actual on-court stuff here. I’ve seen fans balk at the potential hire here - why? This is a guy who won a national championship at BAYLOR UNIVERSITY, people. Look at the types of universities that win these things over the last 30+ years. Baylor is not one of them. He’s a God there as he should be. If you get him, celebrate.
Nate Oats, Alabama. Won’t happen, in all likelihood. Not because of the Oats buyout - who cares, money’s not real in college sports - but because Oats is winning a lot at a much easier situation. Can he win a title at Alabama? Maybe. Can he win a title at Kentucky? Probably, but it’s not such a massive jump in resources or money that it’s worth it to me. We’ll see.
Matt Painter, Purdue. Take a swing. Why not? If he says yes, you’ve won; if he says no, no harm no foul. You don’t play those guys anyway.
The various NBA types that will get rumored here. Billy Donovan will be the front-runner among this group. Billy Donovan hasn’t coached college basketball since 2015, when the shot clock was still at 35 seconds and transfers had to sit a full year. I’ll buy that he’s interested and that this will work when I see a single NBA guy come back to college after 5+ years away and do it. Even Fred Hoiberg got back in before the portal was The Portal. Put Brad Stevens, Nick Nurse, etc. all in the same pile here. Why would they do it? The only guy that I could see with a 3% chance of him saying yes and it working would be Joe Mazzulla, because he’s actually coached college ball pretty recently and doesn’t seem like the most NBA-style coach I’ve ever seen but man.
Dawn Staley, South Carolina WBB. I mean, they should try this, but they won’t.