Arkansas coach John Calipari high-fives forward Zvonimir Ivisic before the game against Kentucky at Rupp Arena. / Jordan Prather-Imagn Images
Kentucky Wildcats fans began Saturday night by booing John Calipari. They ended it booing Mark Pope and his players.
On a stunning night in Lexington, the Arkansas Razorbacks played their best game of what had been a hugely disappointing season, transforming Calipari’s return to Rupp Arena into an 89–79 upset victory of the No. 12 Wildcats. Cal spent the last several years frustrating Kentucky fans as their coach; now he’s frustrated them as an opponent. Swaggy Cal came back from the grave.
With just more than three minutes remaining and the outcome no longer in doubt, UK fans started sprinting for the exits as if fire alarms had just sounded. They didn’t want to be around to see Cal revel in this moment. Big Blue Nation had been winning the breakup with its ex-coach for the first three months of the season, but Saturday night changes the equation.
Among the fans who stayed for the final minutes, sporadic boos rang out. Not with the vicious volume of Ohio State Buckeyes fans haranguing their football team after the loss to the Michigan Wolverines, but the boos were audible.
This was a bad outcome for Big Blue Nation. Very bad. And a delicious one for Calipari, who showed that it’s still dangerous to count him out, even a decade past his prime.
“It’s hard to win in here,” Calipari said. “I looked up a couple times [at the scoreboard] and I thought we were losing because I kept looking at Kentucky instead of Arkansas. … It was 15 years here.”
Fifteen years—many of them great, but not recently. The one and only national championship was in 2012 and the last Final Four was in ’15, even though the NBA draft picks kept rolling through the program. It was Cal’s declining returns that forced him to flee the best job he’d ever had, relocating almost his entire operation (players and staff) to Fayetteville in tacit admission that he could no longer get it done at Kentucky.
The early returns at Arkansas had been lousy—a 12–8 start that included a 1–6 record in the Southeastern Conference. The Hogs came to Rupp well outside NCAA tournament consideration. They leave it significantly closer, but they still need to stack a lot of wins to get into the bracket.
For Pope and his overachieving team, the honeymoon might have ended abruptly Saturday night. The captain of the 1996 Kentucky national champions memorably said at his introduction last spring, “I understand the assignment.” And a key part of the assignment this season was winning this game.
“There’s a lot going on in that game,” said ESPN analyst Jimmy Dykes earlier in the week. “Is there pressure on Mark Pope to win that game? Yeah, there probably is.”
All the good feelings that came with beating Duke, Gonzaga, Tennessee, Florida and Louisville just ran headlong into an embarrassing defeat in a game the fan base all but demanded to win. At 15–6 overall, 4–4 in the murderous SEC, Kentucky has injury issues, rotation questions, defensive lapses—and perhaps a newfound lapse of faith in its first-year head coach.
“It’s a journey for us,” Pope cautioned afterward. “It’s not a coronation.”
Since program patriarch Adolph Rupp was forced into retirement at age 70 by state law in 1972, Kentucky has had seven coaches. It’s a destination job, but not necessarily a long-duration job. From Joe B. Hall through Calipari, the average tenure has been 8.7 years—and that’s with four of the six in that span winning national championships, the kind of thing that can make a man coach for life in many locales.
Generally speaking, the best way to leave Kentucky is to never come back, at least as a competitor. Hall retired, becoming a beloved figure in his later years. Eddie Sutton was run out amid scandal, landed at Oklahoma State and never coached against the Wildcats. Tubby Smith found an escape hatch to Minnesota, another move that was best for all involved parties, and never faced his old program. (Smith made an appearance during a timeout Saturday night and was bathed in warm applause.) He was followed by Billy Gillispie, a disastrous fit that lasted two years after Billy Donovan and Rick Barnes turned down the job.
The only two who subjected themselves to Rupp returns are Rick Pitino and Calipari. On an intellectual level at least, both had to know what they were getting into.
Pitino is the only coach post-Rupp to leave at peak popularity, coming off consecutive appearances in the NCAA tournament championship game and one national title. Unlike Calipari, he did not go directly to a competitor—he jumped to the NBA, and a failed tenure with the Boston Celtics. It was his next job that burned bridges, coming back to college at archrival Louisville.
Pitino endured merciless booing every time he returned to Rupp as coach of the Cardinals. Smith, a former Pitino assistant, did little to stoke the backlash. But Calipari and Pitino had become abiding enemies by the time Cal got the job in Lexington, and he made it his mission to torment Pitino.
“We want him thinking about Kentucky when he goes to sleep every night and first thing when he wakes up every morning,” a Cal confidant said at the time.
Now it’s Calipari’s turn to be on the receiving end. And, interestingly, for Pitino to extend a measure of grace to him, putting out a video on social media Thursday encouraging the Kentucky fans to be nicer to Cal than they were to him on his reentry to Rupp. And in fact, they were—Cal was booed vigorously, but not viciously.
Razorbacks forward Trevon Brazile blocks the shot of Wildcats guard Travis Perry. / Matt Stone/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
It could be argued that Pitino’s magnanimity was aided by the fact that his St. John’s team is currently much better than Cal’s team. It also helps that control of the UK program had been transferred back to one of his former players—the Pitino coattails are longer in Lexington than Cal’s, as it turns out. Rick is, by and large, back in good graces.
(When informed Thursday of Pitino’s video message, Cal said, “Um, that’s nice of him to do. But those fans there are engaged.”)
Although Calipari moved within the SEC, the nature of his departure was different than Pitino’s in this one important way: Most of Big Blue Nation was happy to see him go. The schtick had gotten old, the results had diminished, the thrill was long gone. Kentucky fans could embrace the Cal Way when it was working, but they never really loved it—and when the winning diminished, the irritation increased.
After the pandemic wiped out the 2020 tournament, Cal’s last four teams went 1–4 in the SEC tournament and 1–3 in the NCAAs. They were still bringing in first-round NBA draft talent, but losing to the likes of Saint Peter’s and Oakland. After 15 seasons, it was time to go.
“John needed to leave to get a new lease on life,” ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla said.
An unlikely chain-reaction of job changes gave Cal his exit plan. SMU fired Rob Lanier and surprisingly hired Andy Enfield away from USC. Then USC hired Eric Musselman away from Arkansas. Calipari, who had a friendship with chicken magnate and Razorbacks mega-booster John Tyson, seized the opportunity to make a huge salary at a program with a national championship in its history.
That allowed him to save some face, but it also was a tacit admission that he couldn’t do it at Kentucky anymore. The latter half of his tenure was as disappointing as the first half was glorious. After all the grandiose talk (“We don’t move the needle, we are the needle”) Cal turned tail and ran to an easier job.
In the end, Calipari’s Kentucky tenure did not distinguish him beyond Hall, Pitino and Smith—despite having more talent than any of them over a longer period of time. Players shuttling through an operation built more as a transitory NBA pipeline than continuing the program legacy of excellence. It became a Cult of Cal more than the People’s Program.
When Pope was hired—fourth choice or not—he subtly aired the list of grievances Kentucky fans harbored during the Calipari era. Without mentioning names, he made clear how his program would be different.
“Entitlement leads to sorrow and depression,” Pope said that day. “And gratitude leads to joy. What all of the future players will learn really quick, O.K., is that they are not doing those jerseys a favor by letting the jerseys clothe them. It will be one of the great honors of their life to put that jersey on.”
Then Pope went out and recruited a completely new roster—players from all over the country, most of them largely uncelebrated—and put a surprisingly powerful team on the floor. They have risen from No. 23 in the preseason AP poll to No. 12, and from No. 43 in the KenPom Ratings to No. 18 entering Saturday.
Pope and Calipari greet each other before the game. / Matt Stone/Courier Journal / USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Arkansas, meanwhile, went the other way—from No. 16 preseason to unranked, and from No. 29 in KenPom to No. 57. It’s been a towering disappointment for Razorbacks fans who thought they were getting vintage Cal, not fading Cal.
“There’s surprise, almost shock, that this is where they are,” ESPN analyst Jimmy Dykes said this week. “… We live in a fix-it-now world. Cal knows that. Arkansas knows that. That has not happened.”
This is where Wildcats would have been—yet again—if Cal had stayed.
The players on the Arkansas team would be the players on the Kentucky team—in addition to those who transferred with Calipari, three others were committed to play for him at UK. The same stale coaching cronies on the visiting bench surrounding Cal on Saturday night would have been with him on the home bench.
“They have individual pieces that are good players,” Dykes said. “They have not fit together nearly as well as they need to.”
Thus Arkansas entered the day tied for 14th in the 16-team SEC at 1–6. The Hogs were not a threat to the Cats’ status. If living well is the best revenge, the living was better in Lexington than Fayetteville.
By the end of Saturday, that status had tilted considerably.
At Paul’s Fruit Market on Shelbyville Road in Louisville on Friday, two Kentucky fans were discussing the topic du jour—the return of Cal to the commonwealth. They are glad he’s no longer the coach of their team. They rehashed criticisms of his style of play and coaching, well-trod ground around here in recent years.
They noted that his current team, like several of his Kentucky teams, doesn’t shoot well from three-point range. But they’d seen Cal pull a few rabbits out of his hat over the years, and they were bracing for the worst-case scenario Saturday.
“They’ll make ’em this game,” one man said soberly.
“No doubt,” the other said.
Lord, did they make ’em. Arkansas came into this game 236th nationally in three-point accuracy at 32.5%. Then the Hogs made their first three attempts of the night, on their way to a season-best 52% from deep, hitting 13-of-25 attempts.
“Coming back and playing this well—we played well, we did,” Calipari said. “We made a lot of shots. It’s nice to know they can play this way.”
Thiero brings the ball up court during the first half against Kentucky. / Jordan Prather-Imagn Images
The former Wildcats who followed Calipari to Fayetteville all played better than anyone saw them perform in Rupp as members of the home team. D.J. Wagner, a top-five national recruit whose career has been underwhelming thus far, tied his season high with 17 points and set a season high with eight assists. Seven-footer Zvonimir Ivisic made four threes after making a total of six in Arkansas’s first seven SEC games. Wing Adou Thiero scored 21 points, his SEC career high.
It was the kind of sly Calipari sneak attack he’d launched on opponents many times over the years. When things look bad, he has a history of finding a way out. And doing it here, with more than 21,000 people heavily invested in seeing him leave the place they once idolized him with a loss, was vintage Cal.
“He’s always has our backs,” Thiero said of Calipari. “We felt like tonight we had to have his.”
