Mark Wiedmer
A seven-word message for Kentucky basketball fans this morning: See ya. Wouldn’t want to be ya.
Either today or tomorrow, John Calipari, the coach of the Wildcats for the last 15 years, is expected to be announced as the new coach of the Arkansas Razorbacks. No offense to Arkansas, but such a move would have been unthinkable at any time over those 15 years until this past weekend, when the Razorbacks began their search to replace Eric Musselman, who took the Southern Cal job.
After all, when the late Eddie Sutton was introduced as the UK coach in 1985 after building the Hogs into a national power, he famously quipped: “I’d have crawled all the way to Lexington” to take the Cats job.
While Cal might say at his introductory press conference, “It’s nice to feel wanted again,” it’s highly doubtful he’ll say he would have “crawled to Fayetteville,” to coach Arkansas.
What he will want to do is bring a lot of current Wildcats and UK signees for next season to Fayetteville.
He did at UK when he left Memphis, bringing in DeMarcus “Boogie” Cousins and John Wall, who supposedly would have signed with Memphis that spring.
He currently has the No. 2 recruiting class in the country and three of those six signees just performed quite well in last week’s McDonald’s All-American game. If Calipari indeed leaves Kentucky, it’s almost 100 percent certain that none of those three will attend UK and many of the current Wildcats will jump to the NBA or Arkansas.
And Cal is likely to encourage a scorched earth scenario in Lexington if only to prove how wrong the Big Blue Nation has been to want him to leave following this season’s shocking first-round NCAA exit to Oakland. It’s like, “You’re going to miss me when I’m gone because the program is about to become Vanderbilt bad.”
What the program may become in this era of transfer portal/NIL is Nebraska football bad. Go back to the 1990s. Nebraska won three national championships between 1994 and 1997. It seemed unthinkable at that time that the Cornhuskers would be anything but in the national title hunt every year.
But then coach Tom Osborne retired and everything turned to dust. Since that 1997 natty, Nebraska has endured 10 losing seasons (the Cornhuskers are currently on a seven-year run of losing seasons) and is on its sixth head coach following Osborne.
Why should Kentucky hoops be fearful of mirroring Nebraska football? Like the state of Nebraska, the Commonwealth of Kentucky is a relatively small and rural state with limited financial resources for UK athletics. Case in point: A recent NIL initiative with a target goal of $1 million has raised around $50,000. You can’t buy a backup point guard for that. One very big reason Arkansas is an attractive job for Calipari is the wealth and supposed commitment of longtime Cal friend John Tyson of Tyson Chicken (worth an estimated $2.8 billion) and Dallas Cowboys owner and former Razorback football player Jerry Jones (worth a reported $13 billion). If properly excited about Calipari’s hire, that’s a whole lot of potential NIL money.
Kentucky has zero such boosters and isn’t likely to find any. It’s a recipe for a disaster if the current roster for next season is gutted, as it almost certainly will be.
Beyond that, Cal’s sales pitch to get a player to the NBA and the billions of dollars in contracts his UK players have been paid is gone as a recruiting tool. No more Anthony Davises, Karl Anthony Towns and Tyrese Maxeys selling UK recruits on how Cal got them to “The League.”. UK had a record seven NBA All-Stars this past February. It’s doubtful any of them will praise UK for getting them there. They’ll now praise the Arkansas coach. And the side perks of playing for Cal, such as this past summer when the Wildcats were in a summer tournament in Toronto and had a pool party at entertainer Drake’s home?
Gone. All gone.
NIL and the transfer portal are the new kingmakers of college basketball and Kentucky isn’t likely to rise to the top of either of those under a new coach.
And don’t think the potential coaching candidates - Alabama’s Nate Oats, Baylor’s Scott Drew, Florida's Todd Golden, the Chicago Bulls’ Billy Donovan, St. John’s and former UK coach Rick Pitino, CBS analyst Jay Wright - don’t don’t know that. They might all out X-and-O Cal, but can they build a Final Four program in today’s environment? And knowing what a fragile, contentious relationship Cal had with UK athletics director Mitch Barnhart, would they even want to try?
On the face of it, Kentucky is still Kentucky, the winningest program of all-time with the second most NCAA titles. But it’s also become a program built on the sand of Cal’s oversized personna and shtick of being the coach who’ll get you to the NBA the fastest and teach you the traits to keep you there better than anyone in the business.
In other words, the attraction to the Kentucky basketball brand to high-level recruits and transfers was Cal and Cal alone.
Considering that, and Cal’s expected passion and determination to prove he still knows how to coach, look for Arkansas to soon get back to the “Forty Minutes of Hell” success the Razorbacks enjoyed in the early 1990s under Nolan Richardson. And given that Barnhart’s lone previous basketball hire he made without notable interference from boosters was Billy Gillispie, don’t be surprised if that hire _ one first-round NCAA loss and one NIT quarterfinal loss in two seasons _ won’t look similar to whoever replaces Cal.
No one may see this coming as this year's Final Four wraps up in Phoenix between Purdue and defending champ UConn. And for the record, I think UConn will beat Purdue, 83-68, winning its 12th straight NCAA Tournament game by double-figures.
But Cal leaving the Bluegrass for the Ozarks is sure to get mentioned more than once on the CBS telecast, Cal dominating much of a Final Four telecast for the first time in 12 years, which was his only NCAA title ever in 2012.
As for the school he leaves behind, basketball is undeniably much easier to maintain on a nationally competitive level than football, but that doesn't mean UK isn't much closer to mirroring Nebraska football since 1997 than the record Cal will post at Arkansas. And if that happens, Big Blue Nation and Barnhart will have only themselves to blame.