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Myron Medcalf
On Saturday, John Calipari will return to Lexington for the first time since he left Kentucky for Arkansas in April.
His homecoming is one of the biggest events of the 2024-25 men’s college basketball calendar. Calipari is, after all, responsible for taking Kentucky to seven Elite Eights, four Final Fours and one national championship title, as well as for finding and signing elite young talent who went on to be NBA stars.
“Walking in that arena, storied arena, and walking in the wrong door, the other door,” Calipari said during his weekly radio show ahead of Saturday’s showdown (9 p.m. ET, ESPN). “Seeing my friends the night before. Having my friends — dear friends, lifelong friends — but they’re Kentucky fans. Their whole life they’ve been Kentucky fans. I just hope they’re neutral. But they are Kentucky fans. We gave our heart and soul. [My wife] was like a mother to those kids. So, yes, there is going to be some emotion.”
For all of Calipari’s successes, the end of his tenure in Lexington was frustrating — for everyone. When he left, his legacy was marred by two NCAA tournament first-round upsets in the previous three seasons, a public spat with the school’s football coach and a lack of bringing Kentucky more of the national titles fans were accustomed to.
He was expected to bring his earlier successes to the Wildcats’ SEC rivals in Fayetteville, but the Razorbacks are currently struggling in SEC play, having lost six of their past seven games. Additionally, star freshman and NBA prospect Boogie Fland is out for the season because of a hand injury. The Razorbacks will need a miraculous finish to play their way onto the NCAA tournament bubble.
It’s a stark contrast to how Kentucky is faring in its new era, under coach Mark Pope.
The No. 12 Wildcats are poised to secure a top seed in the NCAA tournament after marquee wins over Duke, Gonzaga, Louisville, Florida and Tennessee. They’re currently 4-3 in SEC play, commendable given the caliber of the league this season. They’re clearly thriving under their new coach, who has brought a new energy to the blue blood program.
Still, Pope hopes Calipari is treated with grace in his return.
“We have been blessed at the University of Kentucky to have some of the greatest coaches to ever coach the game of basketball,” Pope said on his weekly radio show Wednesday. “Certainly, Cal is one of those. He’s a Hall of Fame coach. In his 15-year tenure, what he accomplished at the University of Kentucky was incredible. In some ways, he revolutionized the game of college basketball, and that probably won’t be reproduced in the same way he did it.”
Ahead of Saturday, let’s take a look at key moments that defined Calipari’s 15-year tenure in Lexington.
An explosive, star-filled debut
When Calipari became Kentucky’s head coach on April 1, 2009, he was inheriting a program that had been stuck in the worst postseason drought in school history. Though it had made the NCAA tournament nearly every year since 1992, Kentucky hadn’t reached the Final Four in 11 years.
Those 2009-10 Wildcats went viral. Calipari had signed one of the best recruiting classes in the country, including DeMarcus Cousins and John Wall, who went on to be first-team AP All-Americans. They and three others were picked in the first round of the 2010 NBA draft — a record at the time. “The John Wall Dance,” performed by the star freshman before the season began, was mimicked around the country.
Calipari invited Drake to Big Blue Madness, Kentucky’s preseason kickoff, and the rapper showed up, announcing his new allegiance to the Wildcats. (In his 2015 song, “Scholarship,” the Canadian star even rapped, “I rock Kentucky blue,” highlighting his friendship with Calipari and other Wildcats.)
He and other celebrities — Jay Z, Ashley Judd, Samuel L. Jackson, Shaquille O’Neal — attended Kentucky games, putting a stamp on the program’s newfound popularity and cultural appeal beyond basketball. That the Wildcats once again fell short in the Elite Eight in 2010 didn’t matter. Calipari had restored the program’s name and elevated expectations in his first year on the job.
Yet, Calipari also angered some when he said the 2010 NBA draft was “the biggest day in the history of Kentucky’s program.” The statement hinted at his eventual approach to college basketball: sign as many future pros as possible and market Kentucky as their best landing spot before the NBA.
A national championship and a near-perfect season
In 2010, Calipari received a tip about a young talent in the Midwest who’d grown seven inches over the summer and would soon attract offers from every top program in the country. At Perspectives Charter School in Chicago, Anthony Davis didn’t even have access to a real gym, so he and his teammates had to practice at a nearby church.
Coming off the success of his first season in Lexington, Calipari pursued Davis, who would anchor a decorated 2011 recruiting class featuring three top-10 prospects (Davis, Michael Kidd-Gilchrist and Marquis Teague). Davis became just the second freshman in the sport’s history to win the Wooden Award after he and his teammates led Kentucky to its eighth national championship in 2012. Davis and Kidd-Gilchrist then became the first teammates to go first and second in the NBA draft, respectively, that year.
The national championship run not only made Kentucky a giant of that era — it was part of four Final Four appearances from 2011 to 2015 — it also established the blue blood program as an NBA factory for young stars. And Calipari seemed to own his reputation as the greatest recruiter of the one-and-done era.
Prior to the 2014-15 season, he held an NBA combine-like workout in Lexington just for his team, attended by dozens of NBA scouts and executives. That team, starring Karl-Anthony Towns and Devin Booker, won its first 38 games and was undefeated until it lost to Wisconsin in the Final Four. Still, six players — including No. 1 pick Towns — were selected in the NBA draft that summer.
It seemed then as if Calipari’s greatest years had just started. If Mike Krzyzewski was the king of college basketball, then Calipari was the game’s prince. The truth, however, was that Kentucky had unknowingly peaked.
An evolving landscape costs Kentucky its grip on elite talent
In 2013, Krzyzewski stated his concerns about the trend of freshmen turning pro after one season and the instability the shift could create within the sport. Two years later, Krzyzewski won his fifth and final national championship with a team led by Jahlil Okafor, Tyus Jones and Justise Winslow, three one-and-done players. Coach K’s switch had coincided with a swift change throughout the sport: Calipari no longer had a monopoly on one-and-done talent.
Elite players continued to sign with the Wildcats — De’Aaron Fox, Bam Adebayo and Malik Monk led the program to the Elite Eight in 2017 — but at a decreasing rate. The 2019 recruiting class represented the first time Calipari had failed to sign a top-10 recruit in ESPN’s rankings at Kentucky. By then, however, the sport was changing again, with coaches craving more veteran talent via the transfer portal, which was introduced in 2018.
On top of that, an additional year of eligibility granted to every Division I player because of the COVID-19 pandemic meant more fourth-, fifth- and sixth-year players were available. Teams could regroup, and had to, every year with experienced players, rather than going with freshmen. Combine all this with the change to transfer eligibility and NIL rules, and the market for talent has significantly shifted toward older players. For Calipari, who failed to reach another Final Four after 2015, it had rapidly become more difficult to recruit and win.
“Everybody was mad about a young player coming in and only staying one year,” Calipari said of the portal during a 2023 SportsCenter interview. “Well, now we’re doing it with older players. It’s the same as one-and-done.”
He added: “We’ve got 26- and 27-year-olds playing 18-year-olds.”
A disconnect with a passionate fan base
Before 2014-15, Calipari hosted a celebrity softball game for charity. Fans packed a ballpark near the Lexington campus to watch local standouts and celebrities such as Steve Zahn (“The White Lotus”) and former NFL star Cris Carter compete. Calipari was hounded by fans as he walked throughout the venue. They wanted pictures. They wanted to shake his hand. They wanted to see him up close.
Nearly a decade later, however, Calipari, per sources, became reclusive and disconnected from a fan base frustrated that he hadn’t hung more national championship banners from the rafters at Rupp Arena. He called members of Big Blue Nation, Kentucky’s fan base, “Basketball Bennies,” which some saw as condescending. He also stopped doing some of his weekly news conferences himself, instead tagging an assistant to do them on his behalf. And he ignored interview requests from local and national media.
As Calipari appeared to distance himself from the spotlight while trying to adapt to the changing sport, his staff experienced significant turnover as well.
“You know,” said one former staffer who worked under him at Kentucky, “Calipari only does things one way.”
On the court, Calipari’s squads collapsed. We’ll never know what a team led by Philadelphia 76ers star Tyrese Maxey would have done at the end of the 2019-20 season because the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in the cancellation of the NCAA tournament. During the 2020-21 campaign, Kentucky finished 9-16, its worst record in more than 100 years. A year later, a 26-win group led by Wooden Award winner Oscar Tshiebwe earned a 2-seed in NCAA tournament but was upset by 15-seed Saint Peter’s in the opening round.
Kentucky’s supporters experienced a feeling they had not endured in over a decade: embarrassment.
“We were all ready for this year,” Calipari said in an Instagram post after the loss. “This team didn’t disappoint and I remain proud and fond of each of these players. Please steer your disappointment and anger toward me. These kids did this for all of the [Big Blue Nation] and I wish I could have dragged them over the finish line.”
Just three years after he’d led his team to the Elite Eight in 2019, Calipari had suffered through two unimaginable seasons. The marriage between Kentucky and Calipari, it seemed, was suddenly on the rocks.
A loss to Oakland and the end of an era
5:14
Arkansas’ Calipari on last-second win vs. Georgia: ‘These kids fight’
John Calipari talks about the events that led to the Razorbacks getting their first win of conference play and the ebbs and flows that come with the game of basketball.
Amid an apparent rift with his team’s fan base and even his own athletic department over athletics facilities, Calipari — who had a lifetime contract — entered the 2023-24 season with a sense of urgency. He had multiple projected lottery picks (Reed Sheppard and Rob Dillingham) again. He had Antonio Reeves (20.2 PPG, 45% from the 3-point line), one of America’s best players. He also had the best 3-point shooting team in America.
But then it happened again. The 3-seeded Wildcats fell to 14-seed Oakland in the first round of the NCAA tournament. It was Kentucky’s third consecutive failure to reach the second weekend, and the second opening-round loss in three years.
Days later, Calipari and AD Mitch Barnhart held a joint interview together on a local TV station as questions about Calipari’s future percolated. They wanted to show the top brass at Kentucky and its most prominent coach were on the same page.
“I put my heart and soul in this program,” Calipari said during the interview with Lex18, a local station in Lexington. “So, yes, I care. What we do is a reflection of how we are and how much we care. The state — I believe I’ve proven who I am across the state.”
Just over a week after that, Calipari bolted for Arkansas. And one of Kentucky’s most impressive, trend-setting but ultimately turbulent and troubling chapters ended.
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