Matt Jones, whose Kentucky Sports Radio present is usually a temperature verify for the temper of Big Blue Nation, opened his Monday program with a little bit of a pep speak for a fan base that has as soon as once more trudged by means of a season of angst and unmet expectations.
“Come on, this is Kentucky!” Jones mentioned. “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 4 years in the past, Kentucky swaggered into the NCAA tournament as a No. 2 seed and certainly one of the betting favorites to win the national championship.
Then the St. Peter’s recreation occurred, sparking a disaster of confidence that spiraled into one other surprising event loss in opposition to Oakland two years later. It would prove to be the final recreation 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 issues. Despite a roster that reportedly price $22 million to place collectively — a quantity the faculty hasn’t bothered a lot to dispute — the Wildcats tied for seventh in the SEC and are principally an afterthought as a No. 7 seed on this NCAA event heading into Friday’s first-round game against Santa Clara.
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Meanwhile, a lot of Kentucky’s fan base is pissed off with Mark Pope and livid that the man who employed him, outgoing athletic director Mitch Barnhart, is transitioning into an amorphous $950,000 per 12 months college job that smells like a golden parachute.
Oh, and it doesn’t assist that Calipari simply led Arkansas to its first SEC event title since 2000 and the workforce might 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,” mentioned Drew Franklin, Jones’ co-host, on Monday’s present. “So when he goes and has success, it kind of adds some value to his argument there.”
A 12 months in the past, as Arkansas pulled two upsets to make the Sweet 16 in Calipari’s first season, it didn’t register as a lot of an issue in Kentucky as a result of the Wildcats additionally superior to the event’s second weekend. But now, confronted with the very actual risk of Arkansas making a deep run and Kentucky struggling by means of an early exit, Big Blue Nation must be ready for the onslaught of told-you-so’s that will inevitably dominate the offseason.
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Calipari, in response to some of us who know him effectively, has privately been amused all season by the drama at Kentucky, the fan base turning on Pope simply as it turned on him and the messy departure of an athletic director with whom he had nearly no relationship by the finish of his tenure.
That’s no shock. Calipari is endlessly prideful and has a really lengthy reminiscence for disrespect. Even although he finally left Kentucky on his personal, it wasn’t as a result of he wished to depart.
John Calipari is 48-22 as the Arkansas Razorbacks’ coach and this 12 months’s workforce received the SEC event title. (Jeff Moreland/Icon Sportswire through Getty Images)
(Icon Sportswire through Getty Images)
But the temptation to take a whack at certainly one of the largest manufacturers in faculty basketball for a way it dealt with an all-time nice coach is an train in rewriting historical past. If something, Calipari ought to thank Kentucky — not only for the tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} he made there but for giving him the motivation to reinvent himself one final time at an age when a lot of his contemporaries are heading for the exits.
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At age 67, Calipari has gotten himself again in the recreation.
“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 mentioned Sunday after the SEC championship recreation, rattling off an inventory of gamers he was proud to see play effectively in opposition to 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 near a public center finger as Calipari is ever going to boost towards Kentucky, the place a firestorm would pop up each time he mentioned his objective was getting gamers drafted into the NBA reasonably than profitable a nationwide championship.
You can perceive why Calipari feels his method has been validated as soon as once more. In two years at Arkansas, he’s proven the world he’s nonetheless obtained his contact 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 nonetheless the model these future NBA stars care about. The faculty is incidental, simply as it was at Kentucky and Memphis earlier than that.
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But even if Kentucky followers are going to endure a bit of bit as they notice how true that all the time was, it doesn’t imply they had been fallacious for souring on Calipari or that he would have been in a position to do what he’s doing at Arkansas if he’d stayed.
We’ll by no means know for certain how it may need performed out, but what we will say with certainty is that Calipari’s tenure at Kentucky was going the fallacious course. His first 10 years had been undeniably nice, together with the 2012 nationwide championship. But after the COVID season, neither he, nor the program, was ever the identical.
Calipari was nonetheless attracting nice expertise in his last years at Kentucky — Cason Wallace, Reed Sheppard and nationwide participant of the 12 months Oscar Tshiebwe simply to call just a few — but the program wasn’t working the manner it ought to have. There had been loads of culprits. A stale assistant teaching employees, administrative dysfunction, gamers who didn’t actually match the type Calipari most well-liked to play.
But at the finish of the day, Calipari established a typical at Kentucky that he didn’t meet over his last 4 seasons. It was, fairly merely and organically, the right time for a divorce.
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Only Calipari can reply whether or not he obtained complacent after signing an $86 million “lifetime contract” with Kentucky in 2019, shortly after a dalliance with UCLA. But looking back, that was the second he ought to have bolted.
At a college like Kentucky, the place basketball is faith, the expectations are unreasonable and the off-court calls for are by no means ending, a decade as the head coach is like 20 anyplace else. Calipari knew when he took the job there would be a shelf life. He simply couldn’t deliver himself to depart the place behind when he was nonetheless comparatively on high.
Getting the likelihood to start out over with a brand new problem and a little bit of a chip on his shoulder was precisely what Calipari wanted as he hit his mid-60s. From afar, he seems to be like he’s having enjoyable once more in a manner that simply didn’t appear doable anymore at Kentucky, the place folks stopped laughing at his jokes and tuned out all the basketball homilies that they had heard too many instances earlier than.
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Sometimes, for the sake of everybody concerned, it simply wants to finish. The Calipari-Big Blue marriage ran its course.
That received’t be the narrative if Kentucky’s season ends in one other March catastrophe on Friday and Arkansas goes on to a deep event run. But it will be the reality, regardless of how a lot Kentucky followers are advised they need to have vendor’s regret.
